


Secretary Woes

by coyotes



Category: Borderlands, Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol, Amputation, Blood and Gore, Death, Domestic Violence, M/M, Manipulation, Mental Health Issues, Murder, Surgery, medical drug use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-03-25 09:53:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 51,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3806098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyotes/pseuds/coyotes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rhys lands a new job - Handsome Jack's personal assistant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Hyperion Welcome

**Author's Note:**

> set before Rhys has cybernetics and before Borderlands 2!

“Now, let’s go over this again. Adrian, is it? That’s your name, right? Adrian?“

“Y-yes sir.” 

“Yes sir _what_?”

“M-my name’s Adrian, sir. That’s my name.” 

“I don’t care about your name, pumpkin. I care about you doing your _freakin’_ job, that’s what I care about. And you haven’t been doing that, have you?”

“N-no sir.”

“Oh. Wow, you just come right out and _say_ it. That’s – _wow_." He lifts his eyebrows and whistles. "I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting that one. Anyway, where were we?"

“My job, sir.” 

“Right, right right right, your job. Well, kiddo, I think you deserve a break. What do you say? See the outdoors? Get some fresh air? Maybe then you’ll start doing your job the way I asked you to in the first place, right?”

He places his hands on the guy’s shoulders just before he steps over the edge of the door that opens up into a room with no other exit, except for one, facing the expanse of space. 

“Well? What do you say? You just gonna sit there with your mouth open like a dumbass? C’mon, kitten, answer me. Try something other than ‘yes sir’.” 

“Uhm, if you’d give me another chance, sir, I’d – “

“That’s it, keep going; I think you’re really onto something.”

“- I’d like a break, to tell you the truth.” 

“Oh, really? Why didn’t you ask? That’s not a problem, you should’a told me so.” He lifts his hand to ruffle his hair, and the guy looks so relieved he might pass out right then and there. 

“In fact, you can start right now! I have the perfect idea, how about a one-way trip to the moon?” 

Jack places his hand over his chest and pushes him back until he stumbles, wide-eyed, into the room, and Jack reaches over to the wall and presses a bright red button that slams the door solidly right in the guy’s face. 

He waves as Aiden or Alan or whatever his name was gets sucked out into space, screams and pleas and blood and guts and all. 

\--

“Hey Rhys, can you hold this for me?”

Vaughn tilts the coffee mug toward his hand and Rhys takes it, grasping it by the handle while Vaughn messes with the coffee machine. It breaks down a lot, and Vaughn’s the only one who intimately knows the coffee machine to the point he can make it work again. 

“C’mon, just tell it to work again; if we’re late to this meeting they’ll kill us. I don’t feel like getting flayed alive today.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Rhys, and you’re the one that’s always making us late! I think I’m allowed to have a few passes.”

Rhys whines, but he doesn’t argue. Vaughn’s right, as per usual, but he doesn’t want to sit around the coffee machine all day while Vaughn talks dirty to it. 

It’s weird. 

“Hey, you!”

Both of them look up when they hear the sound, yelled across the hallway. Rhys has just enough time to connect the voice and the man together and for a startled thrum to start up in his heart before Jack’s in his face, staring him down so hard that Rhys feels like he’s burning. His face probably is.

When Rhys inevitably drops the coffee cup Vaughn reaches out and catches it carefully, pulling back just as fast to make some distance between him and their CEO. Rhys doesn’t have that luxury, frozen where he’s standing with his eyes wide and his hand still outstretched in the same position he dropped the cup in. 

“What, you see a ghost, pumpkin?” Jack snorts, and when he reaches out with both hands and grabs his face Rhys flinches but doesn’t have it in him to do anything against it, rolling forward as Jack pulls him closer. 

“I –no, uh –“ Rhys splutters, brown eyes meeting with green and blue.

“You actually make eye contact, don’t you, killer? I like that. You’ve got guts. My office, thirty minutes.” 

Rhys means to ask a ‘what?’ but it dies off in his throat, coming out as a choked exhale instead. 

And just like that he pats his face, breaks contact and walks off, leaving Rhys standing there staring blankly at the space Jack had occupied. 

“…Rhys?” Vaughn says tentatively, and Rhys whines again.

“Did I do something?” He finally says, still dead-gazing the space in front of him. It takes a while for him to lower his eyes and tilt his head toward Vaughn. “Oh, God, he’s gonna kill me, Vaughn.”

“I don’t think so. He… kind of complimented you, actually.” 

“I’ll uh, I’ll meet up with you later, okay? I think I have to throw up.”

“I don’t think they’ll worry about us being late to the meeting; I mean, that _was_ Jack. You need to sit down? I think I need to sit down.”

“Yeah. Good idea.”

\--

Rhys balls his fists at his sides as he treks the long hallway between him and Jack’s office, everything quiet apart from the sound of his own shoes clicking on the floor. It’s unnerving, would have set him off had he not already been so aggravated. 

He passes a spray-painted drawing of Jack himself that hasn’t been erased off the wall yet, something he probably shouldn’t ask about. Even though he’s curious about it. It looks silly there, and it eases him up a little. At least, until the door opens.

“Hey, new guy! Where’s my coffee?”

Rhys panics, standing at the doorway, frozen. “Sir– I didn’t know you – I’m not -“ 

Jack cuts him off. “Haha, I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding, don’t wet yourself. Sit down.” 

Rhys hesitantly presses on, making his way awkwardly to sit across from Jack, who’s standing beside his desk on the other side.

“And you can call me Jack, kiddo. I’m sick of this yes sir, no sir, of _course_ sir garbage, you know that? Every slack-jawed starry-eyed PA I hire to come in here that goes on and on about calling me sir and does nothing else has driven me up the _friggin’_ wall. But you can squeeze it in there every once in a while if that’s not the only thing you do, okay, buttercup? Okay.” 

“Okay, Jack.” Rhys grins in spite of his nervousness, giddy over being asked to call him by his actual name, directly, and it’s just hitting then that Handsome Jack is standing in front of him, looking at him. He should be terrified, and he kinda is, but that’s overwhelmed by a pleasant dizziness that he’s standing in front of, well, Handsome Jack. Again. And this time it’s far less confrontational.

“Now, let’s talk business. I need a new assistant. I’ve gotta be honest with you, champ, I didn’t pick you because I know you well or anything. You’re not special, I’m sick and tired of handpicking all of my assistants and, y’know, I think it’s time to start fresh. Get someone in here who’s used to being stuck at the bottom of the ladder and maybe he’ll take the job seriously. Can you do that, pumpkin?”

“Oh – yeah! Yeah, I can, Jack. What do you want me to do?” He’s balling his hands up for an entirely different reason, then, all the fear falling off him like a weight in one singular second. 

“Alright, sunshine, hold your horses. Don’t get too excited, I popped the last guy who came in and lied to my face about being capable into space because he couldn’t follow any freakin’ orders. I need to know you can handle it.” He leans forward and places his hand on the desk, eyes boring into him. 

The fear is back, set deep in his gut and surrounded by a pride he’s never felt before. A high, self-absorbed pride that must have come from the Hyperion he was at heart. He felt special, better. “Of course I can _handle_ it. When do I start?”

The pride’s making his normal stutter fade away, giving him confidence and assurance that this’ll go perfectly. It’ll wear off, but he’s riding it while it lasts.

“Let’s start with that coffee, right now. It’s still morning, let’s time you. You ready, pumpkin?”

His smile falls right off his face. 

\--

Rhys re-enters the room with a cup in his hands, shaky and nervous all over again. His breaths are ragged as he sets the cup on the desk for Jack, and he doesn’t dare sit down again, as much as he wants to. 

“Holy shit, did you actually run?”

“Uh… yes? You were… you were, uhm, timing me,” he puffs out, doing his best to keep up eye contact with him even when Jack isn’t looking directly at him, because Jack seems to like that, and Rhys likes that Jack likes that.

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that when you left the room. Let’s just say you passed because you’re hilarious.”

Rhys sits there, jaw tense and huffing through his nose in quiet exasperation. “Sounds good to me, sir.”

“Aha, I like that. You know when to use sir. I think it was a great idea to get someone who’s used to taking orders from a billion different bosses. A great idea. And you haven’t cried yet, I hate when they do that. So whiny. Welcome to the job, tiger.” 

Jack moves to sit on his desk, motions for Rhys to sit down on the chair across from him and when he does, Jack grins at him, picking up the coffee mug and pressing the rim to the lips of his mask. 

“I don’t have a lot of time on my hands. I’m busy, you’ll get that end soon. Paperwork, paperwork, the occasional death sentence, paperwork, paperwork, _paperwork._ I’ve got my hands on the best and the best are a bunch of idiot old men who don’t know the first thing about running a corporation. I need good little schmucks like you helping me with the real work, on the sidelines. My side.“ He growls the last part out, setting the mug back down a little too hard on the table.

“I can do that, Jack,” Rhys says nervously, if woozily.

“Good. Now, I want you to go up to your old boss and spit on his face, then come right back here.”

“I think they’re still in a meeting right now, Jack. I – “

“Even better! Go spit on his face, in _front_ of everyone – oh man, when he asks you what the hell you think you’re doing in his pissy-boss voice, don’t tell him, don’t tell him, just spit on him again. And then walk out. When he tells you you’re fired just – “ Jack snickers, breaking off from his orders for a second to keep up the laughter. “ – Just knee him in the crotch as hard as you can and tell him it’s from me. And then I want you to come back and get started on this project. I’ll fill you in. How long do you think that’ll take? Ten minutes? Fifteen?”

Rhys waits his rambling out, and when he’s asked he’s too stunned to do anything with it.

“We’ll go with twenty, then. Just hurry on back, cupcake. Go on.”

Rhys jolts out of the chair and heads out of the room, holding his breath until the doors close behind him. He lets it all out in one long, tension-releasing exhale and runs the fingers of both his hands over the other nervously as he heads down the same hallway, thinking over how this was going to play out.

Not like his old boss would throw him out of any airlocks for disobeying him, he didn’t have any kind of authority over him anymore.

And he was kind of an asshole. To Vaughn, mostly, but Rhys too. Both of them. Everyone under his little bubble had faced some kind of abuse from him.

So there wouldn’t be any real harm in going up to him and doing what Jack told him to. It wasn’t really a question of morals, he kind of wanted to. And it felt good, knowing that he could. There weren’t consequences anymore.


	2. Human Kittens

Rhys does as he’s told, and it feels good. He makes his boss – former - look like a fool in front of his entire department, and if the rest of them hadn’t been paying full attention as their superior went knees-first to the ground, they had when the words ‘Handsome Jack’ passed from his lips. 

For a brief span of time he feels awesome, drunk on something he can’t name. It’s not power, he doesn’t get off on the power because he just doesn’t have it in him to be so power-hungry he gets off on it but it’s something – he’s doing his job. And he’s doing it right. Rhys leaves them standing there in open-mouthed wonder but the moment the doors swing shut behind him he starts feeling guilty, looks back, decides it’s not his problem, and keeps walking. He shouldn’t feel guilty for any of it.

Besides, it’s not his problem. Guy was an asshole. If it hadn’t been Rhys, it would have been someone else.

Rhys sighs out his troubles and heads back to Jack’s office, ridding himself of all the negative and focusing on the positive. He’d be clearing out his old office soon, he guesses, which he thinks is pretty funny – he’s got posters of Jack up there. Not many, because they haven’t made many, Jack hasn’t been at the top of the ladder too long, but enough. Now he’s switching those out for the real thing, and that makes him grin as he walks through numerous hallways. 

This was happening so fast that Rhys still hadn’t quite let it set in, he’d been picked like a marble out of a bag but it feels like destiny. Like he’s meant for this, meant for something bigger than what he’s been doing for longer than he thinks to count, working for anyone and everyone just to keep his apartment on Helios. 

He finds that he’s not sucking in a deep breath to prepare himself for walking into Jack’s office again; it comes naturally, like he’s been walking in and out of there for weeks.

\--  
Jack gets a real kick out of hearing that Rhys actually did what he told him to. Because he hadn’t been expecting that, and he hadn’t been serious in the first place, according to the man himself.

Rhys didn’t even care. It was liberating in a way, and he knew he’d never hear the end of it from Vaughn. So Jack got a kick out of it, and Rhys got some of his dignity back. And Vaughn, he’d get that from association. No more dealing with a boss who pushed them around.

Except that… wasn’t really true, because Rhys didn’t exactly know how Jack was going to treat him in the long run. He’d heard stories, but Jack actually wasn’t all that bad so far. Just messes with him a little. Nothing too serious, and Rhys really, genuinely hopes it stays that way. 

It’s only been a day, so he can’t really say. 

“Oh! Before we start, what’s your name again?”

“It’s Rhys.”He doesn’t point out that Jack’s been calling him ‘new guy’ ever since he met him, never really asked for his name or gave him the option to share it.

“Whoa-ho, how do you pronounce that, again? Reez?”

“Rhys.”

“Reece.” Jack deadpans, putting too much emphasis on the ‘e’s. 

“ _Rhys_ ,” Rhys repeats, but Jack still doesn’t seem to get it, or he’s just screwing with him. Rhys ends up flustered anyway because it’s not a hard name to get but everyone always reacts the same, and he’s sick of it.

Not that he can complain here, though. Wrong time, wrong place, and wrong boss.

Jack pats him solidly on the back, making him sway a little on his feet. “Ah, we’ll get the hang of it, kiddo. Plenty of other things to call you, anyway. Now, let’s do this.” He claps his hands together in a way that echoes in his office, and Rhys doesn’t argue with that. 

\--  
Jack starts him off with a multitude of mundane tasks, and Rhys is thankful for that. He’s not doing much more than organizing the mess that Jack’s made for himself in his office, all the papers flung around and taped up along the windows and arranging them in a way that makes sense. Occasionally he works out some missing numbers that Jack hands to him, things that mean next to nothing to Rhys but apparently the whole world to Jack. 

He likes the praise for the dull work he’s given, though, so Rhys has no problem sorting through hundreds of papers each hour. Eventually he’ll be working on managing his new boss, and he has to admit he’s really, really worried for that, because the last thing he wants is to schedule wrong and have his ass thrown out into space, just like the last guy. 

“You know, of all my assistants, I think you have got to be the prettiest,” Jack says off-handedly after a few days of working him ragged, as Rhys sifts carefully and silently through stacks of papers across from him. He’s turned around and facing space, so he can’t see the redness rising in Rhys’ cheeks.

Rhys eventually chances a glance upward but doesn’t say anything at first, just continues arranging the papers into new folders as quietly as possible. He doesn’t want to interrupt Jack’s thoughts, and the butterflies rising in his stomach at the compliment only make him want to sit and listen more anyway. 

“There was Meg, though, she was a doll. I mean, she still is, she’s the only one I trusted enough to send down to that craphole of a planet and watch over one of those projects you’ve got your hands all over right now. Had a real bad string of assistants since then, couldn’t find one that really fit, you know?”

Rhys nods slowly, even though Jack’s not looking at him. “But I’m good?”

“You’re better than good, pumpkin. You haven’t made me wanna rip my hair out yet, and I like that. Been needing someone who shuts up and does his work and doesn’t spend hours trying to get on my good side with nothing to show for it but piss-poor product.”

Jack turns around slightly and catches Rhys smiling down at his papers, and he shifts so he’s not facing the darkness of limitless space and stars anymore and instead walking casually around his desk to where Rhys is situated.

“Aw, Rhysie, you have something you wanna tell me?”

“What?” Rhys is still smiling without thinking about it, and he never quite figures out that he hasn’t stopped smiling. “I don’t think so, Jack.” 

Jack closes most of the distance between them by sitting up on the desk Rhys is so close to and reaches out with one hand to run his fingers back through Rhys’ hair, tilting his head slightly up in the process. Rhys keeps his head tilted upward even though Jack’s not holding it there; he’s brushing his hand down the side of his face.

Rhys holds in a whine but he doesn’t hold in the deep flush on his face because he absolutely can’t cover that no matter how hard he tries, and when Jack pulls his hand away Rhys finds himself leaning an inch or so toward where his hand last touches his face. 

“Someone’s got a crush,” Jack says quietly, but it’s vaguely patronizing. Rhys looks down. “Not that I hold that against you or anything, princess.” Jack places his thumb just below his chin and lifts his head up again, forcing him to make some kind of eye contact. “I mean, I am Handsome Jack.”

Rhys doesn’t look him head-on, only at the corner of one of his eyes. And even then, the contact is weak.

Jack finally lets him go after the longest silence Rhys has ever had to sit through in his life, and he’s been through some wicked silences. 

“Well, I’m heading out,” Jack immediately flips back into a demeanor that’s not… anything Rhys is expecting after that, like it never happened in the first place. “You’re free to go when you finish organizing those papers. See you tomorrow, tiger.” 

And just like that he’s gone, leaving Rhys alone in his office with nothing but his own fast-paced breaths for company. Rhys is almost glad after all that and he pulls his hands to his face and prays that he’ll be able to get the flush off of it before he has to leave and face his previous co-workers.

Rhys goes back to organizing the papers after a few dead-silent moments where he feels like he’s not alive and shouldn’t be, through Opportunity files and budgets and incomes but his hands are numb and he’s hardly aware of what he’s doing, because his mind is still focused on the feeling of fingers running through his hair.

\--  
Rhys returns to the apartment he and Vaughn share with little incident but a lot later than he originally intended. It took him way too long to finish up, but it’s not his fault he’s distracted.

All the lights are off so he assumes Vaughn is already home and passed out on the bed so Rhys doesn’t turn on anything to find his way; he doesn’t want to wake anyone up, and he wants even less to explain why he looks like his soul has left his body. He feels up the walls until he finds the doorway to the bathroom and flicks on the light switch inside, sliding in and shutting the door quietly behind him. 

He fumbles with the knob to the shower until water’s spraying down into the tub, glances up at the mirror and finds his face still red. Or maybe it hasn’t been red the whole time, maybe it’s just because he’s thinking about Jack. Explicitly. Again. Or _maybe_ his face is just like that.

Ugh.

Rhys debates it for a moment before turning the knob as cold as it can get and stripping, refusing to look himself in the mirror again. He’s probably gotten all his clothes off in record time and he’s stepping into the shower in even less, holding his breath as freezing water pours over him. 

The cold hits him and it wracks his body with shivers, freezing water pouring down his back and clinging to his skin and eventually, as he leans forward, dripping off of his nose and chin and a few loose strands of hair that had been moved when Jack - when Jack touched him. 

Rhys groans to himself in the shower, more out of frustration at his own thoughts than anything else, and decides he might as well get it all over with, otherwise he'll explode. 

He turns the shower back to a comfortable degree and waits a minute under it, mind numb just as his body's numb from the temperature change. It wouldn't be the first time he jerked off to thinking about something like this, that wasn't the issue, he'd just never expected any of this would be a reality. He's had his fair share of fantasies, all of them equally embarrassing enough that he refuses to think about them whenever his hand's not down his pants but most of them involve Jack, and all of those involve Jack touching him. And that's so brutally real, now that he's so close to him. All the time. 

Rhys sighs as he brushes the fingers or his left hand over his abdomen and he can't stop himself from pretending it's Jack running his hand lower and lower until he stops just short of curling those fingers around him. 

Rhys parts his lips as his own hand does just that, loosely forming a fist around his cock that's already half-hard and heavy in his palm. 

Rhys lays his other hand flat on the tile wall of the shower for leverage as he starts a slow rhythm with his hand, still pretending, still imagining he's somewhere else. 

Somewhere like Jack's lap, straddling him while Jack has a hand around him and lips against his jaw, pumping up and down, borderline-lovingly in the way he's stroking and grazes his teeth along his jawbone. His other hand is firmly over his hip, thumb rubbing circles over his hipbone while Rhys jerks into the hand around him. 

But every time he jerks Jack slackens his grip so he gets nothing out of it and Rhys repeats the motion with his own hand as his hips twitch forward to meet his hand in the shower. There's droplets falling into his eyes and a few in his mouth and dripping from his lips but he doesn't notice it, too far into this hypothetical reality he's made for himself after only a few pumps of his fist. 

He keeps up the slow, languid pace for a few minutes, drawing out every stroke as long as he can manage without depriving himself of the niceness that came with it. But Rhys has never been one to last long and he doesn't plan on making a habit of it, getting just as impatient as he is hard. 

"You wanna cum, precious?" Jack purrs in his head, sliding his hand up across his stomach and over his chest, fingers carefully sliding over his Adam's apple and thumb catching on his bottom lip, until that hand's running through his hair again. Just like before. Rhys moans, shutting his eyes and leaning into the motion because this time Jack's letting him; letting him get the satisfaction out of Jack's touches, not leaving just as it gets good. Rhys puts his own free hand in his hair and digs his fingers into his scalp a little, pretending and really, really believing - just for a second - that it's Jack, and not himself. Jack with his thumb sliding over the slit at the head of his dick to wipe away the precum that hasn't been washed away by the shower yet, not him. Jack - Jack biting down on his neck as Rhys gives his reply. 

"Yes," Rhys hisses, the noise lost in the spray under the shower head but not to the Jack he's placed in his head, who only speeds his hand up, twisting his wrist each time he passes over the head of his cock in a way that makes Rhys' thighs quiver and he starts anticipating it, shivering just before the motion actually happens. 

He waits for Jack's permission, Jack to let him know it's fine, he can cum, he's been good and a good assistant and a good _everything_. But that thought drives him over the edge before the fantasy Jack can tell him all those things.

When he cums in his hand and over the wall of the shower his whole body shakes, and the afterglow doesn't last nearly long enough to be satisfying. 

And soon, that pleasant warmth in his gut turns into embarrassment and shame. 

And disappointment. 

Jack wouldn't ever do any of that. Not to him.


	3. You Will Be Perfect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn't touch himself when he gets back to his apartment on Helios, but it's tempting. Not totally because of the new guy, but just because it feels so good to have someone under him who can actually follow an order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey there uh i'm snow (sandpapersnowman on ao3/[tumblr](http://sandpapersnowman.tumblr.com/)) and i'm doing a guest chapter because i'm gay and the author is an angel who smiled down upon me and said that i can put in a jack pov chapter yeehaw

His new assistant--'Reese', maybe? Something like that--is both the prettiest PA he's ever had and maybe the most pliant. He'd let Jack put his hands all over him today, touching his face and his hair and getting way too close to him, and took it like a champ. Took it in a pretty cute way, too, honestly; he didn't know it was even possible for someone to turn that red.

He'd left work shortly after that, leaving the kid--Rhys!--to finish going through his paperwork for him.

Sure, he'd be lying if he said he didn't hope the kid stayed longer than necessary. Sat in his chair and touched himself, maybe accidentally got some cum on his desk or something so he could yell at him and rub his face in it the next day.

Figuratively, that is. Not literally rub his face in it. 

Well, maybe literally. It'd be funny to watch him try to squirm away from his own mess.

He doesn't touch himself when he gets back to his apartment on Helios, but it's tempting. Not totally because of the new guy, but just because it feels so good to have someone under him who can actually follow an order.

Ha. 'Under him'.

...The kid probably _would_ love to be under him, though. Despite just turning red when Jack pointed out his little crush and not actually saying anything about it, that was already a dead giveaway that Rhys _wanted_ him. He'd probably be so easy to get on the ground. He'd probably be his footrest, if he asked, and from there he'd just need to ask him to sit up a little for his mouth to be close enough to his dick to make him think about it. 

That's all he wants, for now, just to work the kid up for a while. 

Maybe tomorrow he'll touch his hair again. Ruffle it, maybe, when he gets his morning coffee spot-on like he has since day one. He'd _love_ to smack him, just a firm pat to his cheek, see if he gets as slack-jawed and starry-eyed as he had been, but he doesn't wanna fuck with him _too_ much so soon. He could probably get away with putting something in his mouth?

He laughs out loud a little at that, the image of going over some document with the kid, brandishing a pen, and shoving the end of it in Rhys's mouth and making him hold it there. The look of confusion, maybe some paralyzing fear.

He can't wait until he can really, _really_ mess with him. Casually grab his ass, casually slap him in the face, casually brush his hair out of his eyes while his lips get redder and redder around the base of his cock and his fingers dig into his thighs. He seems like the kind to get off on praise and doing what he's told, too, so maybe he only has one hand on Jack's thigh and the other is flat between his legs, and he's desperately, shakily rocking his hips up into his palm.

Great, now he's tempted to go back to the office. He doesn't know if he'll be able to _wait_.


	4. People Are Really (Sorta) Good At Heart

Every day, Jack makes a habit of touching him.

It’s killing Rhys, slowly but surely.

Rhys can’t shake the idea deeply nailed into his head that Jack knows – somehow he knows what Rhys did to himself in the shower that night, what he did to himself long before that, too. There weren’t any cameras in there, but Jack had to have this extrasensory ability about him – and that terrified Rhys more than Jack’s behavior did. 

Each day, it’s something different. 

The first day he comes back after a night of very little sleep, that same night, Jack rewards him after a few hours of organization with his hand back in his hair, except this time he just ruffles it, and pulls his hand away. Rhys’ shoulders slump as Jack goes through with the motion and he wants to say something, feels like he should, but Jack doesn’t give him the opportunity. He goes right back to avoiding a conversation about it by steering Rhys away from it altogether.

The next day, Rhys is making his morning rounds before heading in when the speakers go off. It’s Jack, directly addressing him – an overly friendly tone as he tells one entire section of Helios that Rhys needs to come up to his office with coffee and pretzels. Rhys hauls ass, obviously, and when he sets the things down on Jack’s desk just like he’s asked, Jack pats his back.

Except he doesn’t just give him one solid touch and then go back to business, he lays his palm flat between his shoulder blades and rubs there for a moment, long enough to leave Rhys’ breaths shaky and his knees weak. 

After that, Jack puts his arm around his shoulders as they walk to his office.

Sometimes they don’t sit across from each other and share a side instead to go over something together and Jack brushes his knee against Rhys’ thigh. And once, but only once, Rhys says something that Jack thinks is hilarious or… he thinks Jack’s not laughing _at_ him, anyway, and Jack puts his hand just above Rhys’ knee and lays it there, squeezing hard enough that Rhys can barely keep his leg from jerking on reflex. 

The longer Rhys says nothing about it, the more Jack touches him. Rhys doesn’t connect the two, he’s too blinded by the thought of how Jack’s going to touch him today, and after that, and what he’ll do next, that it’s the first thing he thinks of before coming in. He starts really liking the job, and really liking Jack. If he could possibly like Jack any more, that’s the point he was at. 

The nervousness has mostly abated because Jack’s _nice_ , he’s always got a hand on him in some way and Rhys enjoys every second of it, but won’t say it. It’s not his job to say anything or question Jack anymore, and he’s fine with going right along with whatever Jack does.

Like all the mining he’s doing on Pandora for reasons he won’t disclose with just about anyone. Rhys is not one of those people he’s given information to, and Rhys knows it’s not his business. He goes through the papers, though, the amount of Eridium flowing through Hyperion. It’s a lot. Rhys has no idea what Jack’s feeding, but it’s not his _job_ to know. He finds a lot of comfort in Jack not giving him every snippet, anyway. Gives everyone a whole lot less reason to want him dead. 

Except one day, all the touching stops. 

\--

Rhys sits through a meeting with Jack and his colleagues, scribbling down everything said on a notepad lain flat on the table. His hand burns and they’re only a few minutes in and he’s not really paying attention to what he’s writing or how legible it is, just so it translates from mouth to page. The outside of his left hand’s covered in ink.

He’s interrupted by Jack suddenly yelling a sharp “Rhys!” just a few feet from where he’s sitting and Rhys’ pen flies out of his hand and ends up halfway across the table in front of someone else. He also makes a noise he’s not proud of, a small yelp that cracks halfway through.

“Sir?” Rhys panics as he multitasks, looking toward him and reaching desperately for the pen he’s discarded at the same time, and nobody’s moving to help him in any way. They’re all frozen. 

“Oh, I thought you’d just write that down. The screaming your name part. In big old capitals, R-H-Y-S, and then you’d keep going. Didn’t mean to interrupt you, cupcake. Where was I?” 

\--

Jack does it again the next meeting, and that time his pen doesn’t fly so far. He’s tense for the rest of the meeting, preparing himself for another outburst he’s expected to sit through and ignore – or, technically, write down – his fingers clench tightly around the pen to keep it from going anywhere if Jack does decides to keep pushing. 

\--

By the fifth time or so Rhys has it all figured out. He’s still tense throughout the entire meeting but he’s ready for it, and when Jack inevitably screams out his name his hand jerks but he writes it down without a second thought. Big, bold letters on the paper – RHYS, written down without a shaking hand. When he looks up again, once Jack has kept on going with his lecture, he finds Jack occasionally looking at him in a sort of way that’s almost frustrated, but even that’s not the right word. Persistent, maybe. Of what, Rhys isn’t sure. 

\--

Rhys does everything he’s told. He gets Jack’s coffee; he organizes his meetings, his days off, what he does at every second and how he’s doing it. Jack tells him to write something down, Rhys writes it down. Jack tells him to run down halfway across Helios to deliver a message to someone he could easily email, Rhys does it. Jack goes out of his way to make Rhys’ life a living hell, Rhys puts up with it. 

At least he’s not that Wallethead guy Jack likes to vent his frustrations on every once in a while, that would be embarrassing. Jack doesn’t do those kinds of things to him. His aggressiveness is more focused on telling Rhys to do things and go out of his way, on smacking him around more figuratively than literally like some metaphoric pinball. 

But Rhys deals with it, and puts on a smile. The smile’s not even fake, either. He’s getting paid well and Jack hasn’t murdered him or any of his friends, nor really threatened to; he’s used to bosses treating him like crap but what he’s not used to is his boss being practically his favorite guy in the world. 

He can’t say he’s his number one, because Vaughn’s pretty high up there. So’s Yvette. But they’re friends, not idols. So if he narrowed it down to his idols, well, Jack would be the first and only on the list. Pretty high. 

He wants this job, and he wants to keep it. Rhys wants to be the one assistant who Jack never found any real fault in, and Jack deserves to have one. Rhys isn’t perfect by a longshot, never could be, but he’s determined as all hell to keep up with Jack. 

\--  
Rhys comes home absurdly late each night because Jack’s working him harder and harder with every passing hour, and one time, Vaughn’s still awake. Rhys has gotten into the habit of sleeping on the couch when he gets home but Vaughn currently fills that space.

Vaughn watches him as he gets on the carpet and lays there on his stomach by the couch instead of on it, effectively giving half of his entire face rug burn in the process. 

“You sure you don’t want the couch?” 

Rhys groans, turning his head away from him. “Just turn off the lights, I need to sleep so I can get up and get a head start on everything I didn’t finish. Please?”

Vaughn’s a good guy, and he listens. He knows just about everything about Rhys’ ordeals but not in the sense that he complains about them all the time. Rhys just likes to talk, and he talks about Jack. It’s a common topic under their roof and Vaughn knows enough about what happens at Rhys’ job to fill in for him, he thinks. And do a pretty good impression of Rhys’ plain-and-simple worshiping of the guy. But Rhys will never call it worshiping or tolerate the idea that he worships and idolizes Jack, and so Vaughn never says he does. 

It’s a process. But Vaughn lets him do his thing and lets him ramble about Jack touching him, about Jack not touching him, about Jack substituting touching for screaming at him in the middle of meetings, and that’s all he can ask for in a best friend. 

He sleeps on the floor because he’s too tired for anything else and regrets it in the morning when Jack has him out and about while he’s sore in every place he thought was physically possible, and then some.

\--  
Jack and Rhys stand shoulder-to-shoulder while they go over a presentation Jack’s intended to make to the other employees. Rhys is just as enthusiastic as he is for any other job, but he knows that no matter what he suggests Jack always goes off on his own and strays away from whatever is written on a page, so he doesn’t put too much thought into what they’re saying. Most of it is Rhys agreeing with Jack and Jack pretending to agree right back. 

“Whadd’ya think of this part, sunshine?” Jack says as he points down with one finger at a section of the paper that’s got scribbles all over it, and Rhys reads over it again, slowly, so he doesn’t screw up. 

“I think – “ 

He’s cut off by Jack taking turning slightly to face him, taking the pen from between Rhys’ fingers, holding it in his own pointer and thumb and jamming it into his mouth, stopped only by Rhys instinctively biting down on it before it goes deep enough to make him choke. Jack sits there with one end of it in his hand and the other end clenched tightly between Rhys’ teeth. 

Rhys relaxes his jaw to speak again, gets one half of the word ‘sir’ out and only half because the second he unclenches his jaw, Jack drives the pen deeper, pressing it against his tongue. Rhys can only clench his teeth again because there’s nothing else he can do if he wants to keep the pen from getting shoved down his throat. 

Jack laughs at him, shakes the pen between his fingers and watches as Rhys shakes along with it like a dog holding onto his end of the rope. Jack reaches up with his free hand and gets Rhys’ jaw between his thumb and his fingers, getting Rhys to pry his teeth apart by putting pressure on his jaw until Rhys can’t take it anymore, opening his mouth for Jack and, subsequently, the pen. 

But Jack doesn’t jam it down his throat. He takes it out instead, slick with Rhys’ own drool.

Rhys doesn’t seem put off in the least.

\--

After a few weeks, Jack grabs a fistful of his hair and yanks, but when there’s no fear in Rhys’ eyes and only vague surprise and bright-eyed wonder, Jack violently shoves him against his desk instead. 

“You – are so – aggravating,” Jack growls, holding him there as Rhys winces from the sudden movements. “I’ve done everything that’s made my other assistants go and piss themselves and run crying home to their mommies but you’re something else, I don’t know how to _scare_ you.” 

Rhys doesn’t reply, holding perfectly still as Jack stands over him. 

“I can’t threaten to chuck you out of here like garbage because you’re actually fucking competent,” Jack continues, “most of the guys that come here can’t handle another guy touching them because it breaks their fragile egos, none of them were willing to sprint across the whole freakin’ space station five times a day for no reason, and the worst part is, you _adapt_. I throw things at you and you let ‘em hit you a couple times before you start catching them. What am I supposed to do with you?”

Rhys doesn’t know, and he doesn’t get how any of the stuff he’s saying is a bad quality to have. 

“You’re like some loy – trus – you’re like some puppy, no matter how many times I kick you you get right back up and do tricks and I just don’t _get_ it, jeez, I really don’t know what to do with you. You’re one defected Hyperion chew toy, you know that?” He loosens the hold on his hair slightly and Rhys sighs, fogging up the table with the breath from his nose. 

His legs hurt from the position he’s being forced into and he leans backward with all the leverage he’s got, accidentally hitting Jack in the process. It’s an awful idea to say the least, an even worse mistake than he thought it would be. Jack’s hips are up against his ass and for a pure second, they’re both too stunned to do anything about it.

“Whoa there,” Jack says quietly as he jolts his hips back an inch or so and they’re not making any contact except for Jack’s hand in his hair. 

“Sorry! Sorry, that was an accident,” Rhys manages, the cheek that’s not pressed firm to the desk very obviously flushed from embarrassment. 

Jack sits there in a begrudged silence for what feels like a lifetime as Rhys’ face heats up the desk. Rhys can’t see him too well out of the corner of his eye and he doesn’t think he wants to. Jack’s glaring down at him like he wants to cut him up into a million pieces and burn him, while simultaneously looking for all the world like he’s tired of what he’s been doing, tossing Rhys around like he’s the yarn in his paws. 

“What do you think, Rhys?”

“What do I think about what?” For the first time in a while there’s a real hint of fear in his voice.

But then – then Jack’s up against him again, too close, and Rhys’ breath hitches. 

“How far does this crush of yours go, huh, Rhys? Rhysie, talk to me.” 

“I don’t know,” Rhys mutters, near-silently, trying to squirm away and get as much distance as he can between them, because Jack’s fucking with him, he’s doing this because he thinks it’ll wreck him and it _is_ , but not in the way he thinks Jack wants to wreck him. Jack grabs his hip with his other hand to keep him from moving away and Rhys does all he can do to keep in a soft whine. 

It’s the most bizarre game of gay chicken he’s ever played. 

“How far does it go, sweetheart?” 

Rhys bumps against Jack’s hips again because it’s the only direction he can go and Jack pulls back one more time, giving Rhys a moment to hate himself before crowding him back up against the desk. 

Rhys says nothing as he curls his hands into fists on the desk, shutting his eyes in an effort to avoid the fact that this isn’t a dream, this is really happening, and Jack’s not doing it because he wants Rhys to be happy. He’s doing it because he wants to _fuck_ with him. For the first time, Rhys is pissed at him, pissed because he’s ruined all his fantasies in one fell swoop.

“How far? You think about me a lot? You – “ Rhys slams himself back against Jack so hard he stops talking, blowing out air instead of words. 

“Yeah, I do! I think about you all the time, you _asshole_!” He grinds up against him again, and again, and Jack’s not moving at all. His hand stays where it is, his hips stay where they are, he watches him with a blank face until Rhys is too tired to keep going, breathing hard on the desk. 

After that, that’s when Jack moves, one incredibly slow motion of his hips up against Rhys. He doesn’t stop, though, just keeps pressing up against him until he’s rocking against Rhys’ ass and the hand in his hair turns into fingers crawling down the soft strands at the base of his neck and then lower, down to Rhys’ back. He can hear Jack making small noises behind him, so quiet he thinks he’s imagining them at first.

All the fondness he had for Jack pops right back into place, and he finds himself panting along with him until, eventually, they’re both meeting each other in the middle.

“Come on, kiddo. I know you’re not gonna last long enough,” Jack hums, and Rhys shivers, jolts against him one more time before his hips buck involuntarily against the desk hard enough that if he wasn’t halfway through orgasm he would have winced at the pain. Instead he lets out the longest exhale he thinks he’s ever given – no moan, nothing, just the deep breath and thankfully he has the desk to keep him there when he goes boneless.

Jack holds him there, ruts against him even after Rhys has creamed his pants and can barely hold himself up. He hears Jack unzipping his pants but doesn’t focus on it, just basks in everything. He’s only aware of Jack finishing himself a minute or so after the fact because Jack’s pulling himself back into his pants after, Rhys guesses, jerking himself off, still dazed and disconnected from reality. His orgasm hadn’t done that, it wasn’t nearly that great, but this had all happened so fast he couldn’t keep track of time as it kept going. 

And just like that Jack leaves him there with the front of his pants a mess and the rest of him disheveled to hell with nothing but a “See you Monday, champ.”


	5. Black Coffee

He might be panicking a little.

For as much as he’s been messing with this kid and as much as the kid’s taken it, he genuinely wasn’t expecting to end the day with his go-to boy pinned down on his desk and his dick out. And after that _outburst_ , too; he was expecting tears more than anything, maybe a couple pitiful, sobbed ‘sorry’s while Jack fake-berated him for having a big crush, but he hadn’t in a million years dreamt of being _yelled_ at.

What a fiery little _brat_. He’s _great_.

He’d been so quick to snap at him and just as quick to shrink under him and take what he was given, without any words asking for more or less or anything different. All it had taken was Jack poking fun at the fact that he’d been waiting for this for so long, thinking about it for so much longer, and he’d creamed his pants like he’d just been given _permission_.

He doesn’t think Rhys even noticed that he jerked himself off, too busy bathing in like, at least half of his fantasies coming true, let alone notice that half of Jack’s jizz had ended up catching on the back of his thigh and dripping. Ha, oh man, if that pair wasn’t already ruined when Rhys had cum all in them, they certainly would be once that dried and stuck forever.

Thank fuck it’s Friday, too. Rhys’ll have the whole weekend to freak out about this.

\-------

 

It takes Rhys a long time to get up. His legs are sore and so is the rest of him – head from where Jack tugged on him, everything else for a variety of different reasons. But eventually he has to get up, because he wants to go home, and let all of this process. At this point he’s still star struck, dazedly picking himself up from the desk and forcing his body to move across the room and, eventually, through the door to the rest of Jack’s office. 

The halls are mostly empty and Rhys skates by without one or two glances from others, who never get to see him long enough to question the mess all over him, whether that be the stain on the front of his pants or his tie sticking out of his pants slightly, or just the way his hair is going ten different directions; he looks ridiculous.

So he shuffles back to his apartment and slides in as fast as he can before the door has even completely opened.

Vaughn’s in the bathroom. 

That’s when the panic sets in, everything rewinding in his head and playing over again from the start. The gears start turning in his mind and he paces outside the bathroom erratically, reliving every second he spent pressed against Handsome Jack’s desk with Jack literally on his ass. 

“Vaughn?” He starts shakily, banging on the door. “Buddy? You in there?”

He’s halfway through another knock when the door sweeps open, and he’s facing Vaughn, who’s shirtless, drying his hair off with a towel. When he pulls the towel away from his face he looks Rhys up and down once, then again, and blinks. “What happened to you?”

“Hit me.” 

“Rhys – what?”

“Hit me,” Rhys says again, more desperate than before. 

Vaughn gives him another once-over before hesitantly doing what Rhys tells him to do – one solid smack across the face. 

Rhys immediately covers his cheek with his hand, keeping his eyes tightly shut. He sits there like that, looking stupid for a while until he finally takes his hand away. There’s a red handprint blooming on one side of his face but he can’t complain about it because he’s too busy thinking of other things.

“It wasn’t a dream,” he says under his breath, disconnected, and then goes back to pacing. “It wasn’t a _dream_.”

“Do you wanna sit down? You just kind of… made me hit you, Rhys. Should I be worried?” 

Rhys gives him a disgruntled whine in return and turns around so he’s not facing his friend, and when Vaughn doesn’t say anything else, Rhys gets concerned.

Even more so when Vaughn snorts. “Dude, what’s that?” 

Rhys has no clue what he’s talking about, angles his head and sees Vaughn pointing at the back of his pants. Rhys brushes his fingers over the back of one of his thighs and his fingers come off sticky. “He didn’t – I just – I didn’t know he _did that_ \-- Vaughn? Snap my neck.”

“I’m not – I’m not going to _kill you_ , Rhys – I - holy shit, is that what I think it is? Humor me? Please?” He’s grinning at him like mad and Rhys is frowning back, staring his friend down until Vaughn’s grin falters a little. 

“I was in Jack’s office and he – I don’t know, I don’t know how it happened but he had his hand in my hair and he was pushing me, I don’t know. I don’t know! I – I – I don’t know, and then we were… a lot of stuff happened, okay? I can’t explain it, it just happened.”

“You lost me.” 

“Me, too.” He runs the hand that’s not currently covered in _Jack_ through his hair nervously, managing to get it to look somewhat normal again. One strand falls back into his face and all of a sudden he’s laughing, a confused and shocked sort of sound that neither of them know what to do with. 

“I’ve been thinking about this for so long and it happened and I think I need to lay down,” Rhys says in one breath.

\--

Rhys is almost too petrified to go into work on Monday. He _has_ been freaking out all weekend, and he's miserable. He thinks of faking sick but he knows that won’t work, Jack knows him too well, and he doesn’t take sick days unless he’s keeling over. Rhys isn’t the kind of employee to ditch because he feels like it when his boss is someone he respects. 

And that’s, like, a grand total of one boss he’s ever had. And he’s not sure if he should use the word “respect”, when he’d kind of called him an asshole a few days ago. That’s what he’s scared of, mostly. That Jack’s going to call him out on that.

But he’s reassured, too. Jack said that he couldn’t throw him out the way he’d thrown out some of his other assistants, that he’s competent. And that sticks in his mind more than the cum stuck to his pants. Rhys feels secure in his position enough that it goes to his head a little, and it helps him through the walk to Jack’s office on Monday. 

When he gets there, Jack’s already got his coffee, and there’s another mug on the table. 

“Hope you like yours the way I do,” Jack says simply, too busy to make eye contact.

He doesn’t, but suddenly he does. 

\--

Things go mostly back to normal. He says “mostly” because it’s true, there’s some things that have changed, but they’re little things.

Jack touches him more. That’s the biggest difference. 

It’s possessive, really, but Rhys doesn’t think of it that way. He sees everything that Jack does as something almost friendly, and that’s not going to change. It’s no longer a challenge when Jack touches him, not something meant to push him away. Rhys never instigates because he has no idea how and it comes so easily to Jack anyway, so he lets it be, and it’s not so much that he’s ‘dealing’ with it and more like he feels he’s _allowed_ to enjoy it, since that day that neither of them ever bring up. 

The first time he grabs his ass while they look over something Rhys gives him the smallest noise of confusion mixed with just as confused arousal in return, but Jack pulls his hand away, and they make nothing of it. 

He’s just a touchy guy even when he’s not trying to scare the shit out of him, Rhys discovers, and Rhys likes it. He has to admit he loves being touched and he loved it when Jack touched him before until he’d found out he was just doing that to scare him.

Well, the joke was on Jack, but Rhys is still not sure who’s supposed to be laughing at this point, because neither of them really are. 

But the point is Jack’s not afraid to get his hands all over him, and Rhys doesn’t mind it. He gets his hand around his neck and rubs his thumb against his throat, Rhys doesn’t mind; he puts his fingers down one of Rhys’ back pockets, he doesn’t mind; he does just about anything, and Rhys ends up a little hard but not hard enough to point it out and get Jack to do something about it. He’s fine with going home and jerking himself off. He’s used to that, it doesn’t really matter.

\--

Rhys walks in on something he shouldn’t have. Or thinks he shouldn’t have.

He comes back early from his break to get a head start on what Jack wants him to do for the day and he looks up from the papers in his hands to find Jack palming himself through his pants, legs spread as he sits back in his chair. Jack notices him immediately but doesn’t stop, just grins at him while Rhys inwardly presses the panic button.

“Sorry – I can come back later –“ he starts anxiously, but Jack speaks over him. 

“Hey, cupcake, thought you’d come back early. Been meaning to ask, you ever thought about the real thing, or are you just a fantasy guy? I can never tell with you, so you’re gonna have to tell me. But with the look on your _face_ , I think I’ve got it. Again, don’t blame you, but here’s an invitation. If you wanna take it. I’m saying you should take it,” he grunts, and his hand’s still _there_. 

“Get over here,” he says peevishly when Rhys doesn’t move and Rhys kicks back into life, a blush set resolutely below his eyes. He hastily places down all the papers he’s holding onto a free spot on Jack’s desk and then goes to stand in front of him, between Jack’s chair and the desk. 

Jack reaches forward with his free hand and grabs him by the tie, hauls him until he’s close enough, and Rhys holds himself up by putting his hands on the arms of the chair. He doesn’t want to touch him just yet, not without permission, so he stays back until Jack takes the opportunity to cup his hand over Rhys’ crotch. 

Rhys makes a muddled disarray of sounds all at once, noises that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to recreate. He shakes a little and presses into Jack’s hand, and when Jack doesn’t tease him and just keeps going he sighs heavily, resting his head between Jack’s shoulder and neck. 

“You wanna do me a favor, kiddo?”

Rhys nods, and he already knows what Jack’s going to ask him when he hears his zipper coming undone. 

He’s still shaking, now with excitement. He’s thought about this, even though he doesn’t want to admit anything of the sort, and now Jack’s _asking_ him to do something for him, Rhys isn’t the one having to admit he’s thought about this in the past before. 

Score.

Jack nudges him and Rhys takes the hint, sliding down onto his knees a little too hard. Jack’s got his hand around his own dick and he’s watching Rhys, waiting for him. 

Rhys takes a moment to watch him back, to get a good look at him. 

It’s nice, to say the least. 

Jack doesn’t give him long enough to bask in his new view, just grabs him by the hair and pulls him forward. He doesn’t shove him or pull him too hard, just gets him close enough until he can feel Rhys’ near-frantic breaths and waits for Rhys to do the rest, pulling his pants down a little to give Rhys more leverage.

Rhys takes his head into his mouth and sucks, which gets him a small exhale in return. He’s scared to keep going, mostly because he doesn’t want to screw this up and it’s been a long time since he’s given a blowjob but he takes him as deep into his mouth as he can on the first try, pulls back, and does it again, a little deeper. He swallows, and as he does that Jack hisses from above him, puts his hand back in his hair. 

“That’s it, precious – you ever done this before? With one of your little colleagues? Or maybe it was a boss, huh?” 

Rhys thinks that it’s not a good time to talk about his experience with blowjobs in the workplace. 

“Fine, you can tell me later,” Jack says doggedly, “I can’t wait to hear all about it.” 

So he keeps sucking, bobbing his head up and down as Jack encourages him – or, rather, forces him down and up harder, using the grip on his hair as leverage. Rhys can breathe just fine through his nose so it’s not too much of a problem until he’s eased into being able to get him down his throat deep enough that his nose brushes over his skin. Jack likes to keep him there, murmuring small words of encouragement, and it’s making Rhys’ cock throb uncomfortably in his pants. 

Rhys can feel himself about to cough so he pulls back and Jack lets him, surprisingly, until he pops off with a thick trail of saliva connecting his bottom lip and Jack together. 

“Hold on, stay there,” Jack says, part of it through his teeth, and when Rhys sits there with his lips parted and his eyes on Jack, he reaches down and twists his fingers around his own shaft and jerks himself off, too fast to be considered controlled. 

Rhys opens his mouth more when he sees Jack twitch like he’s about to finish, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do other than that. He’d never swallowed before, it always freaked him out, but he’s distracted by his own thoughts when Jack grabs him by the back of his head and pulls him closer when he does finish, and Rhys has just enough time to process hot wetness filling up his mouth before he’s swallowing on reflex. But he only does it once because he can’t bring himself to do it the second time because he’s thinking about it and the rest of it is dribbling down his chin. He looks ridiculous sitting there like that, eyes wide and clueless as to what he’s supposed to do. 

Jack closes his mouth for him and tilts his head upward so that his throat’s more exposed. 

“One more time,” Jack says, and Rhys knows what he’s talking about so he does what Jack wants him to, the new angle only making it easier. He swallows and Jack lets him open his mouth again. 

Jack wipes at his face then, picking up the rest that didn’t quite make it.

And promptly shoves his fingers into his mouth. 

He actually looks caught off guard when Rhys sucks on them tamely, licking Jack’s own jizz off the pads of his fingers. It’s not so bad, Rhys decides, and when Jack replaces his fingers with his thumb he sucks on that just as well as he'd done the first ones, looking up at Jack's face as he does so. 

This goes on for a while until Jack notices how long he's been doing it, and how long Jack's been letting him. He takes his thumb out of his mouth and wipes the spit onto Rhys' shoulder without a second thought, and leaves Rhys to deal with whatever he's got going on below his own belt. 

Rhys doesn't do anything with it.

He thinks that might be rude, to do that in Jack's office. So he deals with it until he softens out, which takes a really, really long time. 

\--

It takes a while for Jack to ever repay the favor, and even then it’s on strange terms – stranger than he wants to admit, and more embarrassing.


	6. Road of No Returning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just wanna say thank you to everyone for the feedback!!! comments and kudos mean the world to me and it really brightens my day when i get notifications for them. i'm not the best at replying to them because i get a little nervous, but i appreciate every single one so much, you have no idea!
> 
> also, absolutely nothing happens this chapter and it's also the last smut thing (i think?) you're gonna get in a while because it's time to stop ~dicking around~ and get to the plot! 
> 
> enjoy while you can.

Rhys wouldn't even call it repaying the favor.

\--

Rhys fumbles with the stapler, a bad grip and a shaky hand pairing up in the worst way possible, causing it to fall back onto the table with a loud thunk and a soft “aw, shit”.

Jack speaks up for the first time in about half an hour. “What was that, princess?”

“I uh, sorry, I dropped something. Sorry, sir.” 

“No, nuh-uh, not that. What’d you say?”

“Shit,” he says hesitantly but he doesn’t know why, the look on Jack’s face just making that sense of dread even worse.

Jack looks surprised he said it twice.

He makes his way over to where Rhys is sitting and grabs his face between his fingers and his thumb then, gently but firmly, and it forces a cold chill to flare up his spine. Jack’s words don’t make it any better – he’s still not scared though, hasn’t been for a while, but he’s nervous. Can’t make that part go away.

“Now, kiddo, we can’t have such a pretty face using that kind of _language_ in here, can we?”

“No, Jack, I’m sorry. Won’t let it happen again.”

“I know you won’t let it, pumpkin, I trust you. But I don’t want you using that anywhere else, either. How can I be sure you won’t leave this office and cuss up the place? I don’t. I’d rather nip this in the bud right now, huh? Whaddya say?”

“Jack?”

“C'mere, I have an idea. I’m not gonna hurt you, just stay put for a second.”

He freezes as Jack reaches for his neck, finds his breath again when his hands go for the tie he’s wearing instead of his throat. 

Jack reaches down and pulls the tie out of his pants, too, drifting way further down his waist than he needs to. 

He lets Jack herd him toward the couch in his office then, using his hand on his back to push him, somewhat-terrified that Jack’s about to choke him to death with his own tie and mostly-reassured by Jack’s promise he won’t hurt him. Jack’s already made it clear that he won’t. 

“Sit,” Jack purrs up against his ear from behind and Rhys sucks in a quiet breath, doing what he’s told and finding the couch, sticking to keeping himself still rather than getting comfortable.

“Lean forward, hands behind your back, sweetheart.”

Rhys does as he’s told again, puts his hands behind his back. He’s red by then, turning even redder as Jack bends himself down to his level and rests his chin on his shoulder to get behind him and twist Rhys’ own tie around his wrists. 

“Haha, you okay, killer?”

“What?” Rhys says distractedly.

“You’re shaking,” Jack points out, and Rhys blinks. He doesn’t know when Jack put his hand on his thigh, but, well, alright. It’s there. And Rhys _is_ shaking, because Jack’s never gone this far before. Like he’s about to do something.

He’s excited. 

Though, he’s not sure why he’s got his hands tied behind his back, or why Jack’s slowly bending down further, spreading his legs apart to situate himself between them. Last he checked, Jack had been reprimanding him for using the word shit, and now he’s just staring up at him with the most curious look in his eyes. 

From between his legs. 

Rhys is still shaking. 

For the first time, Jack places his hands flat on his thighs and keeps them there, leaving Rhys to look down at him with his jaw slack and the rest of him confused but pretty into it. He’s been working for him for a while now, everything has felt natural – they hadn’t done much together, but it –

He’s interrupted when Jack squeezes one of his thighs, and Rhys moans a little.

“Someone’s sensitive,” Jack mutters, mouth close enough to him that he can feel his breath against his pants. “Don’t get too excited, you’re still in trouble, kiddo.” 

“Okay,” Rhys says breathily, not quite grasping the words because Jack’s kneading his thigh with one of his hands and it feels good and he’s desperate, been wanting anything from Jack for weeks – almost months, even. He’d been waiting for it especially since the quickest blowjob of his life and probably the dirtiest, been waiting for Jack to do _something_. 

But he’s in trouble. 

Rhys forgets about that when Jack pulls his pants down past his thighs to let them pool on the floor at his feet, and he’s suddenly nervous as Jack’s fingers dip beneath the waistband of his boxers. He closes his eyes when Jack drops those the same way he dropped his pants.

He’s already pretty fucking solid, and Jack snorts before taking the hand that’s not still rubbing his thigh and almost closing around him, stopping just short just to hear the strangled noise that Rhys makes from the back of his throat. 

Finally he does, and it's even better than Rhys had ever imagined it; he can't help the tiny laugh that bubbles up from his throat when Jack strokes up and down his shaft. 

It doesn't take long for Rhys, as it hasn't any other time before. He should be embarrassed that he can't hold back enough to not look like a horny teenager but he's the furthest from it; in fact, he's having a blast for the first couple of minutes. 

Jack's not putting anything into it, no charm or style or anything, just gets him there. And it works, of course it works, and when Rhys does finally finish it's dissatisfying and short and the only thing overwhelmingly good about it is that Jack's the one who did it; the sound he makes is one of disappointment and frustration all in one breath. 

Jack did it on purpose. And he keeps going. 

His hand is still moving and Rhys is overly sensitive even from that; he's going soft but not soft enough to tell Jack he's not interested at all. Because he still is, even if he's oversensitive and Jack's still rubbing one of his thighs and Rhys is still shaking. It's a mess.

His involuntary reaction is to say the word ‘fuck’ but he covers that up with a desperate whimper, squeezing his legs around Jack.

“No, pumpkin, that’s the right idea. We’re getting all those words out of you, we should start with that one. Say it again.”

“F-fuck,” he mutters, trying to close his legs around Jack still and getting nowhere with it.

“Louder,” and he slides his thumb across the slit just as Rhys takes in the breath he needs to say it.

“ _Fuck_ , Jack,” he moans, squirming and trying to get his hands free so that he can push Jack off by the shoulders. It almost hurts, he knew if he was really free he wouldn't do it, but he's not used to being teased, it's not... he's not used to it. He's used to quickies with some guy every couple of months just to curb his needs, and those never last long and none of them feel any good. 

“That’s it, one down.” Jack rubs one of his thighs appreciatively as Rhys whimpers, leans back against the couch with a frustrated sigh. But Jack starts up with his hand again, and Rhys is too sensitive to do much other than shiver. Jack still has leverage on his thigh and he keeps him from closing his legs too far by forcibly keeping them open.

"Now, you're going to tell me every one of those words you know, and then you're never saying them again. Understand, kiddo?"

"Y-yes," Rhys almost sobs. "Shit," he says immediately, letting a few more words come out of his mouth before Jack stops him. 

"Whoa there, one at a time. Start back again from the top."

"Fuck?" Rhys says brokenly. 

"No, no, not that top. Second one."

"Shit," he shakily gets out, and he think... he thinks Jack winks at him, he's not sure. But he pats his thigh regardless, and stops his movements for a moment to let Rhys breathe. 

But when he goes back to it all he does is keep rubbing his thumb over the head and Rhys can't stand it, pressing himself back against the couch like that'll help him get away. 

"Bastard," he mutters, and Jack hums. 

"What's that you called me when I had you up against my desk? Ah - A-something? Right?" 

Jack doesn't give him a chance to get his response out, he's moving his hands to his hips and pulling him forward and away from the back of the couch. 

When he kisses the side of his shaft, Rhys huffs. "Asshole."

Jack lets his hand rest at the base of Rhys' cock and closes his mouth over the head, sucking slow enough to drive Rhys up the wall. 

"D-do you want me to say the ones that I know, or the ones that I use?"

Jack takes his mouth off of him. 

"Do all of them, pumpkin. I want you to think about this every time you hear them. Like I said, nipping it in the bud." 

"Bitch," he says shyly as Jack goes back to putting his mouth around him, and it's about the only time that word has passed from his lips. 

Jack strokes him as he flicks his tongue over the head, looking up at him from between his legs. His eyelids are drooped and Rhys knows it's on purpose, he's screwing with him again.

At least he's not teasing him the way he'd been teasing him before; before they'd done any of this. Doesn't matter much. 

They go back and forth, Rhys reciting every swear he's ever thought of and everything he's ever heard and Jack listening. It's a lot; he tries, he forgets some, but Jack's hand holding the base of his cock to keep him from finishing the second time draws a lot out of him, including those words he thought he'd forgotten past, like, the sixth grade. 

Rhys is sweating and panting by the time Jack lets him off the hook, jerking him off slowly but not in a way that makes Rhys not able to cum. And he wants to, now; he wants Jack's hand on him helping him along, he's gotten past the sensitivity and he's been past it for a while now, he just wants to finish.

Rhys thinks he's smitten when they make eye contact, Jack looking up at his face with his lips the tiniest bit parted and Rhys looking down, exhausted, hair clinging to his forehead. He'll never say that out loud, not to anyone, not even Vaughn. But it's a fact, he's never been so close to the guy.

Literally. 

When he finally does get to finish he bucks his hips into Jack's hand and Jack lets him, keeps his hand there for Rhys to move into. This time it's good; he whimpers because that's all he can get out, throat sore from all the other noises he's been making for Jack, but it feels like it warrants way more than just a whine. He leans his head back on the couch cushion and digs his heels into the ground as best he can (which isn't that great, he's slipping a little) to get more out of it, and he's grateful when Jack pulls his hand away when Rhys looks like he's too tired for anything else.

Jack grabs him gently by the shoulder to get him to ease forward so he's not putting all his weight on his hands and loosens the tie enough that Rhys can pull himself free but when he goes to rub at his wrists Jack's hands move his away, and he finds Jack rubbing at them with his thumbs instead, easing the tension there as good as anything. 

Jack looks at him seriously. "Language, 'kay, pumpkin?"

Rhys nods. 

\--

And they don't talk about that again, either. Just like they don't talk about anything else. 

But it worked, he guesses. Rhys can't hear anything vaguely inappropriate after that without flinching, Jack's voice growling in his head a quiet _language_ that echoes in there long after that. It's burned into his mind. 

Which, Rhys guesses, is the point.


	7. X

Rhys comes in one day to find Jack in one of the worst moods he's seen, and he's seen quite a few outbursts. Rhys has never been on the direct receiving end and he's glad for that, but he doesn't mind. Jack has a lot to be frustrated about. But this time it's something different, something awful. 

Jack takes a long span of time to say anything, to acknowledge Rhys at all, his fists balled up so tight his knuckles are white as he stares out at space. A few papers are strewn across the floor like they've been tossed there. 

They _were_ tossed there, because Rhys saw him do it. 

"Jack?" He says tentatively, going to pick up the papers. 

"There's a reason we all stay on Helios," he says, startlingly even. "That planet full of fucking savages isn't the place for us yet. I'm trying - I'm _trying_ to make it better for everyone, eventually it'll be somewhere safe, eventually I'll make it work. That's why I've spent millions of dollars making bots to send down there, why all my resources funnel there. I'm _trying_."

He takes a second to continue, sucking in a deep breath. Rhys can tell he's holding back. 

 

"My favorite body double's gone. Down on Pandora, somewhere. He's definitely not on the moon, and that planet is the only other place Helios drops to. He'll get killed in ten seconds, get murdered by a bunch of _fucking_ bandits because they want whatever guns he's carrying or just because his face pisses 'em off, I don't know. I told him, I told all of them that Pandora's just a cesspool of violence and backstabbing and _none of them listen_." His voice is a harsh whisper, devoid of any of the tone or depth that he usually has. 

Rhys stays fixed where he is, watching Jack, eyebrows pushed up sympathetically. 

"Every time I think I can trust one of these thieving bastards it blows up in my face," he starts shakily, then finds himself again, "but they'll understand one day, when they're the ones I have no choice but to get rid of to make that planet a safer place. There's no room for bandits on Pandora, not anymore. I can't help them when they're down on that planet doing God-knows-what just to stick it to the man who's trying to fix everything for them. I don't get it."

Rhys has never heard Jack like this before. He's watching Rhys as he goes to pick up more papers to place again on the desk. 

"I don't have to worry about that with you, huh, pumpkin?"

Rhys freezes. "Of course not, sir. I like working for you."

"No, no, not just that. You see them how they are, don't you? A bunch of violent, crazy thieves and murderers fighting over a big rock in space all for nothing?"

"Of course I do, Jack, I'm with you. You're kind of a hero - at least that's how I see it, I mean, I don't see anyone else trying to fix things like you do."

Jack stares at him. 

He stares at him for a long, long time. 

"Come here."

Rhys is confused by the order but goes anyway, and when he gets within arm's reach of him Jack puts both his hands on Rhys' shoulders. 

"Exactly, kiddo. Exactly. I'm a goddamn hero."

He takes comfort in the fact that that guy, a guy who loses faith in those words, will never be him. 

\--

 

One day, they're interrupted. 

Not that they're in the middle of anything, but Jack gets a call. He leaves it on speaker; there's almost nothing Rhys hasn't heard already and Jack's somewhat let him into a circle. A circle just outside of Jack's most trusted circle (if it could be called trust), but a circle nonetheless. 

Rhys overhears just about everything. He's got some pretty dam - _darn_ valuable information stored up in his head, now that he thinks about it. He's proud of that. 

"Talk to me," Jack says, and Rhys can tell the guy on the other end is some scrawny lab-rat who's probably holding a clipboard in one hand and biting his nails with the other. He's not happy that he probably lost the stick draw and had to call Jack himself, that's what it sounds like. Rhys hates those kinds of guys. Jack's not that hard to talk to. 

"H-hi, sir." And there's the stutter. Rhys grins from his position at Jack's desk, feet propped up on the desk itself. "I've been told to inform you we have been working on some... experimental tech down here that we want you to check out, I mean, when you're not busy... sir. We think we've made a breakthrough with one of our projects."

"What, you think? You called me up and took time out of my day to tell me you _thought_ something? Well, gee, glad I hired people that can think. That's what I pay you for, isn't it? What're you even talking about?"

Jack rolls his eyes in Rhys' direction, and Rhys mirrors the motion. 

"We've been discussing... " the guy keeps taking breaks in the middle of sentences, "... upgrading Hyperion workers, cybernetically, to do more than they could before. Be more useful. Like Wilhelm, but... far less drastic."

"What, we're gonna have a bunch of smaller, less competent Wilhelms running around? Pretty sure the bots can fill in, we're good on the peace-making for Pandora. One Wilhelm is more than enough."

"No, not on the offensive, sir. This would be strictly on Helios, if you want it to be, of course. More like storing information for easier access; implanted desktops, computer enhancements, the ability to -"

"Well, if you wanna show me, you come up here. Call me interested, glad to know you're not all just sitting around doing nothing down there like the output suggests. See you later, kiddo."

Jack hangs up on him. 

"Jack, you should probably give him a time to come up here."

"Oh, yeah. Hold on." Jack calls him up again, waits until he hears the startled sound of his voice and cuts him off. "Hey, kid, when's the earliest you can come up here with a presentation of whatever this is? Preferably with someone who can actually get some words out." 

\--

They have to wait a while because the lab guys are probably working on some extensive report on this tech they're going on about and can't come just yet, so Jack orders food for the two of them while they wait. Both of them. 

"So you just have a bunch of guys doing random science here?" Rhys says through a mouthful, twisting in half-circles in his chair. Rotating seats were always fun. 

"Yeah, don't have time to supervise, I just pay 'em and their incentives are 'I won't kill you if you make me happy' and a wad of cash. Had to clear out the previous scientists a while ago, most of these guys are brand new. Sucked, new ones aren't as good, but I'll take 'em, since they don't screw me over. They do enough, and if this is actually worth something, it's a win-win, huh?"

Rhys nods and goes back to eating. 

 

\--

Rhys is allowed to join in on the meeting. They did bring someone else up, a couple other people who sounded slightly more confident than the one they'd talked to before. 

Or, Jack talked to. Rhys hadn't played a part in it. 

Jack settles down closest to the screen with Rhys sitting in the seat just next to him, watching Jack as he taps his fingers impatiently on the table. 

As they go on with it, Rhys finds himself so intrigued he can't stop staring. They tell them about ECHO implants, about what it would be like to have all the information you could ever want in one place within your skull, how useful it would be to have a walking hub of knowledge under Jack's thumb. It would be effective, would allow them to destroy documents that they didn't want getting around. It would make whoever had them extremely valuable to anyone. In this case, Jack and all of Hyperion.

They don't even have to play it up, it's interesting as is. Rhys manages to pry his eyes away from the screen, currently showing the blueprints of a robotic eye, and sees Jack just as glued as Rhys had been. 

"How exactly does this work? Like, what? Just scoop out some guy's eyeball and pop it in there?"

"No, sir, there's a lengthy procedure involved. We haven't tested it yet, though."

"Well, why not?"

"It's... expensive, and we were waiting for your input."

"Sure, if you can pull this off, yeah. It's a go from me. Well, you need test subjects, or what? We've got plenty of those lying around, just grab some people."

"That's... another thing," one of them says tentatively, "we should discuss in private, sir."

He directs his glance to Rhys, who isn't paying attention. 

Rhys is mesmerized. 

Eventually, Jack pats his leg. 

"Hey, pumpkin. Stand outside for a minute?"

"Sure, sir," and Rhys stands up, glancing at the last slide one more time. 

The doors close behind him and he's left standing in the hallway with the striking image of wiring intricately wound around and through a brain and the idea of an eye that could see _everything_ stuck in his head.

He doesn't wonder what they're talking about in there, he's too preoccupied.


	8. A Matter of Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (╯︵╰,)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long, i was actually in the hospital ;;' funny timing though, considering what this chapter's all about. guess it's fresh in my mind now! a couple things:
> 
> i see your support on tumblr! it really means a lot to me, like... it means a lot a lot. i've seen fic recs involving this and some fanart and stuff and it's so so so so great to see and i'm glad you're all enjoying it!!!
> 
> i have AP tests coming up so it might be a little longer wait between chapters but i could try to make them longer so it feels like less of a wait :0
> 
> also somehow this is the fic with the most kudos on ao3 for borderlands??? thank you so much holy cow??? i don't know what i did to deserve this honestly. i'm not a huge fan of this chapter because i kinda wrote most of it while half-asleep on painkillers so y'know keep that in mind, it's probably not that great. anyway, have fun!

“You been thinking what I’ve been thinking?”

“What’s that, sir?”

“About that presentation. Whaddya think about it?”

It’s been two days, and Jack hasn’t brought it up once until now. Rhys has no idea why he’s been so quiet about the whole thing when Rhys was dying to talk about it and still is.

“What did you talk about when I wasn’t in there?” Rhys says, just loud enough for Jack to hear, even though there’s no one else in the room.

“If I told you that you’d have had no reason to leave, would you, kiddo?”

Rhys screws up his face and goes back to working while Jack paces slowly around the room, sitting in his chair with one hand holding his face up. It’s obvious he’s pouting, and it doesn’t take long for Jack to do something about it.

“I’ll tell you,” Jack says as he rests his chin on Rhys’ shoulder, speaking into his ear. “But then we’re gonna talk about something.”

“Okay,” Rhys nods slowly.

“Stand up, turn around.”

Rhys does what Jack tells him to, as per usual, getting out of his chair just as Jack slides away and kicks his chair so it rolls off a few feet. When Rhys turns around Jack’s pushing against him, hands on the back of his thighs.

“Up you go,” he huffs as he hauls Rhys onto the desk and keeps himself close enough to talk in his ear. 

"We were talking about testers, for those parts," Jack says, "I'm not a fan of the options they gave me."

"And what were those?"

"Nothing big," Jack mutters from his new position with his lips almost touching his jaw, "and that's the problem. No good ones, it's a pain not having any good options for something like this."

He sighs against Rhys' skin and Rhys tenses up. 

"They didn't let you pick?"

"Well, they did, but from a lineup."

"Who'd you pick?"

"Nobody, pumpkin." Jack kisses along his neck, back up to Rhys' ear. 

"Nobody or it's none of my business?"

"Nobody," Jack repeats, "and that's how I'm going to get into the next bit of this - " he nips the underside of Rhys' jaw as he pauses, "- since I'm the big bad CEO of Hyperion, I figured lineups are for bozos and I don't need 'em, and I can pick whoever I damn well want."

Jack presses closer, marking up the place where Rhys' pulse beats the hardest with his teeth. "You want them, don't you?"

Rhys hums an affirmation.

"You'd look so pretty with mismatched eyes, wouldn't you? And all those records tucked into your head, you'd be the perfect little employee, yeah?"

Rhys nods. "Yeah, I would."

"Someone's confident," Jack laughs, "it's rubbing off on you. Tell you what. You really want this? Might be a little different - a whole lot different, you can't back out of it once it's done. You want them, you tell me."

Rhys can't see it, but Jack's eyes are open, and he's waiting. 

"Yeah, I want it, Jack. I really do. Be the best guy you ever worked with."

"I don't doubt it," Jack grins and Rhys can feel it on his neck until Jack pulls away, satisfied, and goes back to his pacing. 

\--

So, naturally, he tells Vaughn everything that could be considered confidential. 

\--

The pictures from that PowerPoint seem to be burned into the back of his eyes; he'll be working and suddenly he remembers what's going to be part of him in just a few hours and he gets a simultaneously good and bad feeling in his gut. Jack's not letting him work on the really time-consuming stuff because going into some weird-ass surgery they haven't explained to him will probably be hard enough to deal with, so not working too hard in preparation is alright by him. 

There's something Jack wouldn't tell him, though. Rhys doesn't know what it is or if that thing is important, he just has a feeling that something's up. But he doesn't hold it against Jack - Jack's not a guy that goes around spilling his inner feelings to anyone who wants to listen. 

And Rhys doesn't expect him to be.

They don't explain much to him, other than the fact they need someone willing so they don't have to deal with someone moving around unnecessarily and ruining the whole thing, and then subsequently dying and wasting their time any money. That's understandable, apart from the fact that he's not going to be awake anyway so he wouldn't move or wouldn't be doing it on purpose in the first place. Maybe they meant before. They're so secretive about the whole thing to the person they were going to do this to, and that did nothing for his nerves. 

Jack doesn't come with him, he's busy and says he'll be down there by the time they're done - which is supposed to take hours, but it should fly by since he'll be, y'know, unconscious. They warn him about the pain he'll experience afterwards but it won't last long since he'll be on so many medications they listed off that he'd be just dandy. 

They said that. 

Dandy.

They also tell him he won't remember anything that happens, or most of it, until he's taken off of those medications. So no retention of memories. So, great, there'll be a span of blank space between now and whenever they decide to pull him off his meds, and he won't remember whether the nurses were pretty or not. That's fine with him, he just wants this part over with so he can start being Hyperion's new poster child. 

Maybe his time with Jack really was rubbing off on him. He'd never had a craving for being so damn special until the doors opened up for that opportunity, and now it's all he can think about. 

It's mostly unceremonious - they check his heart, but that's about it - they don't take his blood. Or anything else. They don't seem to care if there's anything wrong with him apart from his heart functioning normally, and Rhys can't decide whether that's good or bad. 

They don't have him strip into a hospital gown, either, they just let him in with the short-sleeved standard yellow Hyperion shirt he's got on, since it doesn't matter too much anyway. They just need a spot to jam a needle in his arm and access to everything above his neck. Cool. 

The doctor who takes him to surgery is creepily quiet, doesn't make small talk. 

Saying he's nervous at this point would be an understatement, because he can feel his heart pounding in his ears and he's experiencing way more than some pre-surgery jitteriness, way more. 

It looks like a dentist's chair, almost. Something's different about it but he can't quite place it, as he's not really looking at it, more at the five or so people standing around like they've been waiting twenty years for this. 

He's shaky but still holding on to confidence as they situate him and tell him absolutely nothing. It's as if he isn't there, and Rhys thinks that if they're testing all this out and using up all this money and time to give him tech implanted into his freaking brain they should probably talk to him beforehand –

Unless he could die. 

He flinches as one of them cuffs one of his wrists to the side of the chair he’s propped up in, tests it by trying to pull his wrist out of it. It doesn’t budge, and when they grab for his other wrist his heart skips a few beats and he instinctively pulls his hand away.

“Relax,” another one says sharply, this time a woman, pushing on his chest so he sits back. It distracts him long enough that they can grab his wrist and cuff that one, too. 

“H-hold on – “ Rhys whines as the man tightens it until he can’t move that hand, either, but they keep doing their thing instead of actually paying any attention to him. Someone's grabbing his right arm, which is hyperextended in the cuff, searching for a vein. He finds one and Rhys balls his other fist to keep his right arm relaxed, turning his head away from the needle so he won't look at it when it punctures him. 

Rhys was never fond of those things; he could deal with anything else, just not those. Must just be the suspense. 

They hook him up to an IV, which is a relief – they care enough to do that, at least, but they don’t tell him what’s in it. So much for signing forms of consent; maybe they didn’t want to waste paper, maybe he’s in actual fuc- maybe he’s in actual danger, here. 

“I – excuse me? Is there, like, I don’t know, a possibility this might not work?” He says quietly to the person nearest him, who doesn’t glance at him twice. 

He’s like a piece of meat.  
When his eyelids sink, one of them moves to take another belt across his chest and shoulders, but that time he doesn’t flinch. All at once he’s too tired to do anything except wait this out; his anxiety’s still there at the back of his head, but he can’t really tap into it anymore. 

They’ve got him hooked to other things – he can hear the beeping of a machine in time with his heart and that’s all they _care_ about, so it’s not really a surprise. It’s oddly calming, hearing his own heart beating over the machine.

But below that beeping there’s the distant sound of a drill starting up and Rhys can’t focus on it, whatever they gave him won’t let him focus on anything else, it takes too much effort. 

He doesn’t move when a hand turns his head to one side. 

He doesn’t move when they keep a hand there to keep him in place, either.

That drill’s still buzzing near his ear. 

Everyone moves at once except for him, aching like thousands of wasp stings all in one spot hitting home in his skull until it gets worse, pressure and pressure and somehow even more pressure until he hears a deafening crack that somehow makes it through the haze, and he feels like he’s splitting open.

Rhys screams. 

Hotness spills down his face that he can’t see and he can definitely feel, he can sense everything better than he’s ever been able to before and he wishes to God he couldn’t, wishes they would have given him more to knock him out or something. Anything – 

Something pulses and the beeping has become a distant, constant thrum of sound, his heart pounding so fast he can’t make out each beat. 

He starts calling out for Jack instead, loud pleas as he kicks his legs and tries forcing his wrists out of the cuffs; the pain there from rubbing against the material is nothing compared to whatever they’re doing to his head; Rhys says he’s sorry, he should’ve worked harder, he won’t make any more mistakes but the drill keeps going, and most of him is numb to it at that point except for where his skull had been broken into. 

Eventually those pleas turn into spat-out curses against just about everyone involved, Jack among them, and he’s still fighting hard enough against the cuffs that his wrists are raw from it. Most of what he’s saying gets lost in his throat, just as raw as his wrists, not much of it even makes much sense. 

“You _knew_! You fucking _knew_ , and you didn’t tell me, you didn’t tell me anything, you… didn’t… “

He blacks out. 

Rhys comes to with his head far heavier than it had before. It's pounding in time with his heart, everything's sore beyond anything he's ever felt before.

"Ow, what'd you...? " he stops as he sees the blood pooled all over the once-yellow shirt he has on, still wet. He can feel the same blood crawling down his ear and the side of his face. Everything's hazy, and he mutters Jack's name. Vaughn’s next, though he only gets half of that out.

The pain hits him again; white-hot and burning through his entire body starting with his brain, like an electric jolt from inside of his head, only worse. Ten times worse, worse than before. 

He can’t make any more noises, everything hurts and he can’t remember how to make sound and doesn’t think he could even if he knew how; the drill is gone, he thinks, one of his eyes is cloudy and the other can only see blood. He can’t remember which is which, but that hurts too, everything hurts beyond pain.

The beeping is gone and he has just enough time to register that they’ve unplugged him from the machine and to realize that he’s dying before he blacks out again.


	9. Table for Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everything from Jack's POV is sandpapersnowman... so... basically everything! i love snow lots & i'm too lazy to write more for this chapter so you can all thank snow for this one.

Rhys comes to with a startled gasp, sitting up immediately in the chair, except it's not the same chair he was seated in before, this time it's a bed. A hospital bed. Everything is excruciatingly bright; the floor, the walls, the dull lights that flicker every once in a while above his head. It's disorienting and there's a faint buzzing in his head, and he absolutely can't for the life of him remember how he got here. 

As he turns to the side he glances at the pillow he's presumably been laying his head on, and finds it covered in blood. That's... not helpful, actually, and it's mostly just really terrifying and ominous. Every part of him feels sore and as he turns his head down to get rid of the glare lingering in his eye he notices the marks along his wrists, scrunches up his face in confusion. When he does that, though, the general soreness spikes up to his eye, and Rhys flinches like he's been backhanded. 

He takes one of his hands and carefully touches where his eye should be and thinks he meets bandages instead and he follows the line of gauze up to the side of his head, makes a disgruntled sound under his breath as a thrum of pain hits him. He doesn't move his hand away, though; it's an almost good kind of pain, because he's barely feeling it. His right arm is hooked up to an IV, and there's still fluid running through the tube. 

Something about all that floods him with relief, something he's reaching for but can't grab. The last thing he remembers is Jack telling him he'd look good with mismatched eyes, that he couldn't make it down while Rhys went through the process but he'd be back - Rhys wonders how long he's been out, and what even happened in the first place. Nothing happened, as far as he knows, and he guesses that's because it worked. Rhys had seen the diagrams himself, they must have just pumped him full of drugs to the point nothing made sense and nothing went wrong. 

In his book, that means success. 

There's a knock on the door, deafening as anything could be even though it's just a few small taps. Might as well have been a moonshot. 

He lets it go, though, because he's pretty sure it's Jack who walks in. He's only sure when he can squint hard enough that the lights aren't blaring so harshly; it's impossible not to know who it is, Jack's very distinct. 

"Look at you, mister I-survived-surgery, how you feeling?" Jack says, and he's loud, that's all Rhys can tell. 

"You're loud," he complains quietly, and his voice sounds like it doesn't belong to him and is coming from somewhere else in the room. It's pretty freaking weird. 

"Oh, sorry," Jack whispers sweetly, "you doing okay, sweetheart? What do you remember?"

"I don't remember anything," Rhys says tiredly, frustrated that he can't and when he tries, it just makes his head pound. 

"I know you can't," Jack hums, walks over to flick the bag of fluid connected to the tube running through his arm and then sits down on the bed beside Rhys. "You think I'd really tell you everything they told me when I sent you outside, kiddo? All that about the consciousness and blah blah blah death blah blah blah pain? That stuff's confidential, you know. But I did choose you, because you're something special. Like, I mean, _special_. They said the chances of you surviving this were pretty damn small, like a gazillion to one, but I knew you'd pull through, and... holy crap, they've got you on some killer meds." 

"What?" Is all Rhys can say, because in all honesty, he got about half of that. 

"Never mind, you won't remember this either. You've been out for a week, but you're so resilient. Pretty sure you were legally dead for a minute there, that's what they told me, but like I said, I told 'em it'd work if we put you through it. You don't even remember how bad it was, so it's a win-win, huh?" 

"So I'm alive?"

"Yes, dummy, you're alive." Jack brushes his hand through his hair and Rhys sighs, impulsively bringing one of his hands up to Jack's wrist to keep it there. 

"Remember the first time you did that," he mutters. 

"Me too, cupcake," Jack says... fondly, or concerned, Rhys can't tell the difference. It doesn't bother him too much anyway, because Jack's still in physical contact with him, and he's warm, so that's all he cares about. 

Jack brings his hand to Rhys' leg, still under the covers, slides upward until he comes to a full stop at his chest, palm laid flat over his shirt. He puts a bit of pressure there until Rhys lets go of his hand and falls back down, dazed and experiencing some major déjà vu. 

"What do you remember, huh?" 

"Nothing?"

"That's it," Jack smiles, and he turns off the lights when he leaves.

He doesn't remember the conversation. He doesn't remember a lot of things. 

~~

 

In all honesty, Rhys probably should have stayed out of work for a few more days, or a week, maybe. Between the semi-constant drooling, the stumbling, and the general haze he’s still in from his pain meds, he’s not only useless, but might actually be making _more_ work for himself later. For them _both_ , honestly.

Jack sighs.

“Rhys?”

It takes an even four seconds for Rhys to turn to him, and even then, once he’s making eye contact with Jack (with the eye not still covered in gauze, anyway), he doesn’t seem like he actually knows why he turned in the first place.

“Rhys,” he says again, and this time it only takes him a second to remember he’s doing something.

“Yeah?” he slurs.

“Come here.”

Rhys carefully puts down the folder he was holding, forgets what he was doing, and stares at it for another few seconds before Jack sighs again.

“Rhys? Over here, sweetie.”

The pet name works well enough to keep his attention, and he shakily makes his way toward Jack on the couch.

“Yeah?”

Jack smiles at him. He’s so glad Rhys can’t remember, like, _shit_ on his medication, because he thinks he might be coming off as fonder than he’d like.

“Why don’t you take a break, kiddo?” he says softly, and pats the seat beside him.

Rhys sits down, grinning and beginning to turn red already, but unlike his sober embarrassment, he’s still looking at Jack without any hint of shame.

“You sure?” he asks, even though he’s already sitting down.

Jack pushes his hair back borderline lovingly and hums.

“I’m sure, buddy. You’ve just been trouble today.”

Rhys leans into his hand, but his grin falls a little.

“I’m sorry,” he pouts. “I didn’t want to take too much time off work.”

“It’s okay,” Jack insists. His hand moves down to grab his jaw, not too hard, but enough to almost take the sweetness out. “You’re fun to have around,” he purrs.

Rhys’s smile returns, brighter than ever, and he even giggles.

“Not the best first day back, huh?”

Jack starts to correct him, but then it hits him that apparently Rhys doesn’t remember his first day back. Or second. He’s been back three days already, starting each as eager to work as the next, and it suddenly makes sense why he’s been so over-the-top excited since he returned.

Is he gonna remember today? Even if he does, Jack could still manage to convince him later on that he must have been dreaming. That might be more fun than him not remembering at all, actually.

“You’re doing fine,” he finally says.

He lets himself put his arm over Rhys’s shoulders and pull him closer, effectively, like… _Cuddling_ with him.

Rhys relaxes against his side instantly, not questioning it at all.

Jack even kisses the top of his head and Rhys just giggles quietly.

“You feel okay, sweetheart?” He’s starting to shift to genuinely sweet pet names, no bite behind them, and while it feels weird and he almost wants to go back to kicking Rhys around, this is gonna be so much fun to hold over him later.

Rhys hums. His eyes are shut and all of his weight is on Jack. He’s so _warm_ , too, like all of the thoughts he can’t manage to put together at the moment are going into his blood instead.

He’d love to stay on the couch with him for the rest of the day before his roommate picks him up to escort him back to their apartment, but he should probably get _some_ work done.

Rhys sighs and sinks into him more. He could probably put off most of today’s work, right? After all, his assistant is recovering from a major operation. Also, he’s the CEO and things run on _his_ schedule, anyway.

“You wanna lay down, buddy?”

Rhys nods against him, maybe? He moves his head against him in some way, but he can’t quite tell if he’s nodding or just nuzzling further into his side.

“Why don’t you lay down?” he asks again, but this time, it’s not a suggestion, and he’s getting up off the couch to spread Rhys out on the cushions.

Rhys goes down easily enough. Jack sits next to the couch on the floor, putting him back around eye-level with Rhys.

"You comfortable, buddy?"

Rhys hums; he looks like he's already about to fall asleep, smiling stupidly at Jack and resting his hands on his stomach.

Jack runs his hand through Rhys's hair to get a few strands off his face. He looks so relaxed, his uncovered eye half-lidded and the small smile directed wholeheartedly at Jack gets even more content when Jack keeps his hand there to stroke his hair gently.

"How's your eye feel, sweetheart?"

Rhys laughs a little.

"I dunno," he admits. "Your hand is nice, though."

Jack smiles back at him. 

"I bet," he agrees. 

He switches which hand he's using to pet his hair, his left moving up to hold his head and his right moving down to his waist.

"How's your head, then?"

"Full of fuzz, mostly." Rhys turns a little onto his side, both to face Jack and to press against his palm more. His smile fades a little. "Sometimes it's really bad, though," he says, quiet and sort of... Sad.

"Does it hurt right now?" Jack asks. It kind of makes his heart hurt to hear him like that.

Rhys's smile comes back, just a little.

"Nah," he says, and rests his head completely on Jack's hand. "Not with you here, anyway."

Okay, _ow_ , this is getting too sweet for him.

The hand on Rhys's waist slides across his stomach and untucks Rhys's shirt. His fingers slip under it and rub his skin lightly, _just_ enough to get Rhys's attention.

"You want me to make you feel even better?"

He looks a little confused until Jack's hand slides up higher, then down, then _down_ , and Rhys's breath stutters with Jack's hand pressing on his dick through his pants.

He doesn't answer, so Jack leans forward and kisses his forehead, then his cheek, then barely on the lips, each one coming between rougher and rougher presses and the last catching a small sigh from Rhys's mouth.

"That a 'yes', bud?"

Rhys makes a tiny whine and uses most of his energy to make his lips touch Jack's again, so he guesses it's a 'yes'.

The position he puts himself in to keep pressing little kisses to Rhys's mouth is uncomfortable, but worth it. Between that and his hand still working on the bulge getting started in his pants, he's mostly just lying there, making huffy little noises, whining, and otherwise being a cute, out-of-it wreck. He tries to ask for more, he _thinks_? If he's trying to say 'please', he's only getting out the 'p' at the most; more than anything, he puts his lips together to make words only to open them again on tiny moans.

"What's that?" Jack asks. "You want me to make you cum, pumpkin?"

Rhys whimpers again, long and drawn-out, and less kisses him and more presses his open, panting mouth against Jack's face.

Rhys whines when Jack stops for a moment to get his pants open, and pouts until Jack's touching him again.

He takes his time with him, rubbing slow and hard and giving him lots of attention, and Rhys looks like he's in heaven, no longer bothering to keep his eyes open and no longer trying to keep his mouth shut.

Jack kisses him much more than he'd ever admit; he just looks so happy just from being touched by him, and he finds himself almost overwhelmed by how _good_ Rhys is. 

And, of course, on the off chance Rhys remembers this, there's no way he'd believe himself if he remembered _Handsome Jack_ being so sweet and adoring with him, so, y'know, he'd better be _extra_ sweet to make it even less believable.

"God, you're cute," Jack says out loud. It just slips out, mostly, but if he's going to go all the way with this thing, who cares? "And _warm_ ," he adds, because, honestly, the boy is burning alive.

Rhys is starting to focus less on kissing him and more on just moving his hips; he's not even really moving them up against Jack's hand that much, he's mostly just squirming and _trying_ so _hard_.

Jack kisses him harder, and Rhys gets even more out of breath once his air is being interrupted more often. Jack's hand doesn't stop moving at all now, only squeezing and grinding against his dick under his open fly.

"You want me to take it out for you, baby?"

For the first time in a while, Rhys makes a noise that sounds displeased.

"What is it, honey?"

"I-I don't..." Rhys swallows really hard, and his hand comes up to grab at Jack's jacket. "Whatever you want," he decides on saying. 

"That's nice," Jack tells him, "but _I_ wanna know what _you_ want, sweetheart."

"I'm gonna make a mess," Rhys blurts out. "I don't wanna make a _mess_."

Jack just stares at him for a moment, still rubbing his dick slowly, before a laugh slips out.

"Alright, I honestly don't know what you're trying to say here, bud."

Rhys groans, frustrated from his current inability to just get _words_ out, and from his current state of, like, being _really_ close to cumming in his pants.

"I don't want you to have to clean up after me," he mutters. "Do whatever's gonna be easier for you, does that make sense?"

He shoves his face most of the way against Jack's palm to hide it, and whimpers something out on warm breath.

"Huh?"

"Jack, _please_ , I--"

"Shh, hey, it's alright," he whispers, catching on. "You can cum, baby, it's okay."

"I'm _going_ to," Rhys says, sounding so surprisingly level and almost annoyed that Jack has to bite down another laugh.

"That's fine," he says again.

He goes back to kissing Rhys's face for the next couple seconds, pecking whatever he can reach that isn't still desperately pressed into his palm.

He drools on his hand a little once he cums, which is a little gross, but feeling his underwear start to get wet under one hand and feeling his little breathy noises on the other, uneven and shaky, is _awesome_. He quite literally has Rhys in the palm of his hand, in _both_ palms, and he feels this weird swell of... _Gratefulness_.

He ignores it as much as possible in favor of enjoying Rhys's breath steadying in one palm and his dick softening in the other, but he still lays small, long kisses to Rhys's cheek and in his hair.

He falls asleep at some point with his head still in Jack's hand, but he doesn't budge when Jack begrudgingly has to take his hand back and slides it out from under him.

He hovers a little before calling his roommate to come get him, kissing his forehead gently, making sure the spike in his heart rate didn't spur any bleeding at his temple or eye, even getting him a blanket and carefully laying it over him; he's allowed Rhys to take the occasional nap in his office before, so seeing him asleep is nothing new, but this just seems so...

Different.


	10. Science!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> alright, alright, i know you all want jack to be MEAN because you're all MEAN people, but you gotta wait a little while longer, okay? i finished my AP tests so i should be able to pump out chapters for you guys pretty fast unless something else comes up, so we'll get there eventually! we haven't even gotten into the real plot... so... RIP

Jack had insisted on Rhys keeping the gauze over his eye long enough that he'd be able to see it for himself, and be the _first_ one to see it in completion. 

Since it no longer hurts, neither his head nor his eye, and he's only a little balance-challenged from the medication he's taking at this point, he's fit to go back to work; at least, that's what Jack tells him. If Rhys is being honest, it feels like he's already _been_ doing work. 

Mostly because what he's taking makes him exhausted, but, yeah. Otherwise, he's stoked. There's a huge block of time absolutely ripped from his brain but he's retained his memories from before, and he remembers yesterday (mostly spent in bed), so that's a good sign. He's never felt better, and he's gotten used to the weight of metal in his skull without even thinking about it. It's so good. 

Jack tells him not to waste his time dressing up nice since he won't be running errands, not on his first day back, so Rhys ditches the formal attire and heads down to the office wearing clothes that he could have rolled out of bed in, and Rhys isn't denying nor confirming that. It's up in the air. 

He's too tired to really be antsy but his hands are shaky with held-back excitement. As much work as it is, he missed it. A lot. Even with that weird-creepy-blank space still covering up everything between the pre-op and yesterday morning, he still feels unpracticed and new to the job again, but it's a good feeling. Like butterflies. 

"Hey, aren't you a sight for sore eyes?" Jack calls across the room when he hears the doors shut behind Rhys, and Rhys can see him sifting through laminated papers while sitting on his desk next to the most comfortable-looking chair he's ever seen in his life. 

Rhys doesn't say anything, he just smiles and fiddles with his thumbs a bit, still standing on the edge of the doorway like he's not sure where to go. 

"Hope you don't mind I switched out your usual chair, got some stuff in mind - well, c'mere, cupcake, you gonna stand there all day or what?" 

"Oh! Sorry, it's just... weird. Haven't been back in a while. Feels different, I missed it."

Jack grins back, but he doesn't say anything. 

Rhys closes the distance between them, still giddy and grinning like he's back in school and crushing on the tall girl with pretty blue eyes who sat in front of him and always got the questions right. 

That's... oddly specific. He doesn’t know why he remembered that.

"Been lookin' at some schematics while you were out, but I bet it can't beat the real thing, huh?" Jack's sitting on the desk with his legs crossed and a paper in one hand and a different one in the other, glancing over them and then back at Rhys. "Make yourself at home, sweetheart. You can't tell me you forgot you spent more time here than you did in your apartment, right? Practically co-own the place without paying a cent."

Rhys closes the distance between them and falls into the chair; it rolls, just like his old one, but it's a thousand times better to sit in. Rhys sighs and sinks further into it.

"You wanna get that thing off?" Jack asks, placing down the sheets of paper, which Rhys can now see are some of the same pictures he saw before the surgery, and making a little hand wave in the general direction of Rhys' face. 

"This?" Rhys says as he brings one hand over the gauze, looking up at Jack with the other eye with unbridled joy. He's wanted the darn thing off since he woke up yesterday; feels like it's become part of his face after wearing it for so long, and he hates it. 

"Yeah, yeah, lemme do it, watch out," Jack hops off the desk, situating himself so he's bending a little in front of Rhys, enough that they're on eye level, for the most part. He hadn't noticed it before but Jack's breathing a little hard, and Rhys can't blame him, he's excited too. 

Jack doesn't hurry the way Rhys expects him to, though, he carefully unwraps the bandages like there's a vase beneath all the gauze instead of another person, and when it all does finally come off, they both give dual exhales, Rhys in relief, Jack in... Jack's, he's something else. 

"Wow, look at that," Jack whispers proudly, gently running his fingers down the side of Rhys' face. 

Rhys' breath catches. 

He can see blue, wires crossing his vision the way veins would but much more complex and branched; it's in stark contrast with the other eye he's got, and he doesn't miss having the two together in the least.

"Can I scan you?" Rhys says as he tilts his head into Jack's hand, watching Jack’s face for any confirmation.

“Oh, of course you can, sweetheart.” 

Jack slides down onto his knees, still tall enough that he’s not too far away from Rhys’ face. The chair’s low, and Rhys guesses he did that on purpose so they’d be able to do this. Jack had anticipated this moment just as much as Rhys had… except probably longer, considering Jack _could_ remember the time between then and now. 

It’s sort of a reflex, just to think that he wants to scan and it works, his eye whirring into life. The shade of blue grows brighter and brighter until it almost hurts him, but it doesn’t, he’s just so used to bright lights hurting his eyes that his immediate reaction is to flinch away from it. But it’s… part of him, and doesn’t hurt. He thinks it might be glowing, and he only notices now that the lights in the room are dimmer than they usually are, and there’s a blue swatch of light shining over Jack’s mask. 

What he sees, it confuses him. 

It's the first time he ever doubts Jack, doubts his passion, but the first time he's ever felt so connected to raw power, and it's amazing, it's terrifying and wonderful all at once to the point he gets lost in it, like a daydream he can't snap out of. It’s overwhelming, all this information flooding straight into his brain as well as the metal portion they’ve connected to him, showing him things he never knew before and can’t focus on, so there are just ideas floating around in his head that he can’t quite grasp or make out, because he can’t catch any. 

He has no idea what emotions Jack's sharing with him but they're fantastic - he's never felt this way before and guesses it was never possible to, considering Jack has a range all his own. 

He feels like there's lightning on his fingertips. 

He feels volatile. 

He feels like he knows the world and all it has to offer, all its secrets and its pains and its beauty, the smugness of knowing so much about the world, and something else he can’t comprehend, but most of all he sees… he sort of sees through Jack’s mask a little, and that cuts off everything else. 

It’s blurry, not like full-on x-ray, but the material of Jack’s mask is different than anything else. And for some reason, he’s seeing through it.

He would have rather been able to see through his clothes, because he knows – he knows that nobody sees what’s under there, and right now Rhys _is_ , the simple upside down V printed into his face, and Rhys doesn’t feel drunk off power anymore, he just feels sad. Not because Jack’s sad – no, he’s the furthest from that; he’s like an explosion waiting to happen, but because Rhys wasn’t prepared for that. He still isn’t – nothing could have prepared him for that. 

Rhys doesn’t say anything about it because he’s pretty sure Jack would have to burn his memory or something and Rhys doesn’t really want to have to go through another surgery just to have the image of Jack’s face removed from his mind. So he stays quiet, because that’s all he can do. 

“You still busy in there, pumpkin? Mind telling me what you see?” Jack says, and if Rhys is reading it right, he’s on edge.

“I can feel what you feel, sorta,” Rhys laughs nervously. “I mean, I know how you feel about stuff. It’s… I dunno. Your uh, your emotions, and right now, right now you’re proud, and a couple other things – I’m sorry, still getting used to this. There’s so much going on.” Rhys practically whimpers out the last sentence, and his eye dims out, then flickers. 

“Whoa, kiddo, don’t tire yourself out. Got a lot to do today, you need a break?” Jack sounds like he’s not fond of the idea but he’s fond of Rhys so it doesn’t matter, and Rhys nods. Jack pats his shoulder and hauls himself up off the floor.

“So, you feel what I feel, huh? What the hell’s that like? Weird, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Rhys says carefully as he rubs a hand over his face. “It’s like – it’s so much at once, it’s telling me all these things, but none of them are specific enough for me to really get a hold of them, so I just get vague ideas of how you feel _about_ those things.”

“Makes sense you can’t really read my mind completely, that’d be pretty disappointing, wouldn’t it? Take all the fun out of hanging out with me if you knew everything ahead of time.” Jack sounds surprisingly sober as he says it and Rhys takes the hint – don’t chase after that stuff. Rhys wasn’t thinking of doing so anyway because he wouldn’t like someone else snooping on his private inner thoughts, either, so it’s just a common sense thing. He wouldn’t try.

Though, he did get a kick out of having an edge over others with this. He doesn’t know the full potential of the eye or the rest of the cybernetics he’s hooked up to, and that was only his first try, so everything could change for him.

Maybe he’d try it out on Vaughn sometime. Practice up. 

“Oh! I have something to show you,” Jack says suddenly, and Rhys perks up. “You don’t have to move, just stay there and gimme a sec. You okay with me jamming something into that port of yours?”

“Uh, sure? I mean, that’s what it’s for, right? It won’t hurt… will it?” 

“Shouldn’t hurt for more than a second, there’s some built in reward protocols. You’ll see.” 

Jack grabs something off his desk, scattered amongst the papers – and it’s a little USB – and taps a few times on his desk, pulling up a blank screen in front of them. 

“Alright, so what this is gonna do, _hopefully_ , is it’ll establish a connection between this office and you and you won’t have to ram this into your skull except the one time, promise, so if you’re anywhere on Helios I can – hold on, you’ll see. Let me just – “ 

Jack comes forward and holds the plug near him as if judging whether it can fit or not. 

“We’re gonna count to three, and then I’ll put it in, that work for you, tiger?”

“Yeah.”

“’Kay, one, two – “ Jack holds the side of his face to keep him from getting jerked to one side and then plugs it in with little care for gentleness and even less care for the fact that he doesn’t seem to know how to _count_ , and Rhys _does_ feel the initial thrum of pain as everything slides into place but that’s drowned out easily by the warmth that floods through him. 

“Oh,” Rhys says shakily, putting his hands on his knees to keep himself upright as Jack backs away enough to give him some space.

“Oh?” Jack repeats.

“You were right,” Rhys hums, tilting back in the chair instead of leaning forward – he guesses he must look pretty ridiculous with a plug sticking out of the side of his face and a look that can be best described as post-orgasm stuck to his face, but he honestly doesn’t care, because he feels good and everything’s brilliant. His eye lights up again, not as bright as before but bright enough to notice.

“Oh man, don’t tell me that thing lights up when you’re turned on,” Jack laughs from his position back at the desk, “or do tell me, because that’s gonna be so fun to mess with.” 

Rhys turns red in the seat, tilting back further and not out of comfort, more out of embarrassment. 

“I’m just teasing, kiddo; hey, watch this.” Jack pushes on thin air until the screen hovering over the desk faces Rhys, and Rhys can sort of make out what his own eye can see projected back on the screen. “Like I was saying, when you’re walking around Helios we can just turn this on and I can see what you’re doing, isn’t that nifty? Oh, also, you can mess with lights. Only in here though, but I guess you can get a kick out of flickering the lights whenever. I dunno. You can open doors with it; you’ve got clearance, Rhysie. No need for a key card.” 

“How will I know when you want to see what I’m doing?” 

“Ohh, man, this is gonna be my favorite part, I think. You can take that out now, I’m already hooked up to your cybernetics now. Okay, okay, haha, man, close your eyes.”

Rhys does as he’s told, a little nervous. He places the plug on the desk and shuts his eyes, and there’s a long string of time where nothing happens.

_Hey, babe._

It’s quiet, nothing more than a whisper at the back of his head but he hears it, he definitely hears that, and his eyes snap open. 

“You hear that?” 

Rhys stares at him blankly, and sort of half-nods. 

Jack claps his hands together. “Ha! Awesome, cool, look at this. Oh, man, this is _exciting_ ,” Jack holds up a small earpiece with a button on the side, placing it near his mouth. He presses down on the button and whistles into it, and Rhys hears that same whistle echo in his head. “There’s so much this thing can do, kiddo, there’s so much. You’re special, you let that get to your head, okay?” 

Jack puts down the rod and comes back to his favored position of standing in front of Rhys, who’s slack-jawed in the chair, both out of awe and out of, well, everything else. He’s sort of overwhelmed. 

“Hey, look at me.” 

Hands find the sides of his face and Rhys tilts his eyes up, coming face-to-face with the mask he knows he’s seen behind and probably won’t ever forget what he _did_ see.

“You’re the best damn employee I’ve got right now, which sucks for everyone else, but not for you, pumpkin. You’re so entertaining, and I can’t wait to see what we can do with all this. We’re gonna have a blast, y’know, and I had my doubts, but jeez, you’re a pretty good PA. Pretty good at everything else, too. Really hit the jackpot with you, didn’t I?” 

Jack’s hand brushes over the port and Rhys jumps. Not a full-body jump, just a twitch, but it's enough for Jack to pause. He hovers over the metal but doesn’t quite touch it, like he shouldn’t. 

“Whoa, they didn’t tell me about that one.”

“What one?” Rhys says breathily, and Jack goes back to glide his fingers over the port. 

“Shocked me. You still sore?” 

“N-no,” Rhys huffs, shifting in the chair so Jack doesn’t have to bend so far to get a good look, and the second time Jack touches it he stays there for a while, and Rhys tries not to squirm. It’s a weird feeling, almost like the one he got from plugging that thing into his port, but it’s so much warmer and he can’t help it when he bites his lip and makes a sound from deep in his throat that he’s never really made before. Jack won’t stop touching it now that he’s realized he’s not going to hurt Rhys in the process, pads of his fingers skating over the metal drilled into his skull.

Rhys doesn’t fully recognize he’s even doing it when he rests his hand over the front of his pants and puts a bit of pressure there; doesn’t notice he’s already a little hard and it feels almost as good as Jack’s fingers still running over the metal. 

“Hey kiddo, what’cha doing?” That’s Jack, taking his hands away.

Rhys snaps out of it but doesn’t take his hand away, just glances up at Jack. “Why’d you stop?”

Jack seems taken aback by that, but he doesn’t seem so for long. His face slides right back into the unreadable expression Rhys is so used to, but now that he’s seen the emotions behind it all, it’s a lot less terrifying. Jack, as a whole, is a lot less terrifying. 

Not to say that Jack’s lost all the qualities that make him terrifying – no, he’s still scary and unpredictable, but Rhys got a glimpse behind the veil long enough to think he understands him, just a little bit. 

He’s probably a misguided idiot to think so. 

Jack takes Rhys’ hand by the wrist and guides it away from his crotch, maneuvers him so their fingers are locked together and Jack’s thumb is rubbing small circles into his palm. “Not today, kiddo. Don’t wanna burn you out just yet. We’ll save that for another day, ‘kay? Like I said, can’t wait to mess with all these new toys, huh? Well, I think I can, just a little longer. And if I can, you can.”

“What – why?” Rhys is pouting, of course.

“Same reason I told you you’re not running errands today. Doctors told me you might pass out. Last thing I want is to be in the middle of the best screw of my life and you clock out on me.”


	11. I Would Still like You, You See

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the chapter after this one we're diving into the plot, so enjoy this while you can.
> 
> warning for alcohol and sex stuff. god, i'm lazy.

Rhys has dreams. 

In one he's the new CEO of Hyperion, and he's never felt more alive. There's power practically oozing off him in waves that no one else understands - no one can comprehend how much he holds in the palms of his hands - no one, not a single person, it's all his and no one can take it because they'd implode if they did, nothing has ever belonged to him more than that power does right then. There's a tingle going up his spine and flowing straight to his brain that packs like a sucker-punch when it hits him, over and over and over again. 

He wakes up from that one and basks in it for over an hour, sitting in his boxers on the bed with sweat on his forehead and the remnants of what he believes is raw power still working through his veins. He adds his own little parts sometimes as he sits there barely-awake, little details of what his office is like, how he's personalized Hyperion so that it reflects his image back at him at every turn. 

He always feels guilty after that one, because those thoughts aren't his. They're bleeding through Jack's process, the one he got a glimpse of just days ago, and feeding off of that brief shot of his idol is probably unhealthy. 

In another all he sees the scar and nothing else, except it's branded on his own face. He's trapped outside his body and he can see the way the scar melds deep into his face, and one time, it hurts. 

Rhys doesn't like to think about that one. 

In other dreams, he's a _god_. 

\--

Rhys comes into work with droopy eyes and the memory of the second dream trapped in his head and, for lack of a better word, branded into his vision. He hates those the most because they make him feel the guiltiest, like he's seen something intimate in Jack he never should have and never would have otherwise. 

Jack, however, is excited, and luckily that happens to rub off. 

"Ta-da!" He says as Rhys crosses the room, still rubbing his eyes. Jack's over by the couch with a huge, expensive-looking bottle of champagne in his hands. 

"Whoa," Rhys chuckles a little, "how much _was_ that?"

"This thing? Free. Lot of perks to running the biggest corporation, like, ever, baby. It's probably half your salary."

"No way."

"Uh, yeah way." Rhys can tell he's joking, and the idea of that is absurd, he still feels honored that he's even allowed to look at it. "And you and I are gonna share this bad boy. Later, of course."

"What - me? Why?" 

"Two reasons. One, I like you and I've been saving this one for a while so why the hell not? I mean, you're off your meds, let's celebrate! Get wasted! Two, you're filling in for me at a party next week I can't make it to, and I wanna see how much alcohol you can chug before you throw up. Gotta hold your booze if you're out fronting for me, yeah?"

"I'm doing what?"

"Busy, can't go, party." Is all Jack offers, and Rhys guesses he'll take that for an answer since Jack's not going to offer him a better one any time soon. 

Rhys finishes his busywork about noon, and goes on to the rougher stuff afterwards. Answering messages, scheduling - Rhys hates the scheduling thing, he's always been so unorganized when it comes to dates and numbers, those were Vaughn's thing, but Rhys is getting the hang of it. It's mostly methodical. None of that is bad though when they're compared with crunching numbers to double-check whether things are all in order the way they're supposed to be. 

He's the last one who sees those numbers before they're official, and that stresses him out. Because if he's wrong, he's probably the one who's gonna get blamed for it. 

Jack's helped him a couple times, and Jack knows he's not the best at it so sometimes he pawns off the papers to somebody else so Rhys can catch a break. 

And then there's the suggestion box. Jack always instructs him to delete everything on it, but sometimes Rhys goes poking at them. 

Most of the suggestions are silly, but Rhys does write down a couple of them. Not everyone on Helios is bad at coming up with ideas, but most of them are. Rhys can see why Jack wants to ditch the whole thing altogether. 

So they make it to the end of the day with nothing left to do and Rhys is exhausted, mentally, and he wants a break. The promise of alcohol is nice, so he's got that going for him at least. He doesn't normally drink so it probably won't take much but that's fine with him, he'll waste less of Jack's expensive champagne. 

They meet on the couch - Jack's been out of the room a lot of the day, more so than usual. He looks a little antsy, too. 

Well, the alcohol could do them both some good. 

"Here," Jack says to get Rhys' attention before he sits down. 

He tosses a roll of crackers at him that Rhys barely catches; only managing to do so because it hits his chest and bounces off into his hands. 

"You been to a Hyperion party before, tiger?"

"Well, yeah, I - "

"No, I mean a _party_. Where all the big boys go, not just an office shindig between the co-workers in accounting. The real deal."

Rhys shakes his head solemnly. 

"Shame. Thought you'd'a been the type to sneak into one, like, once. Ah well, party virgin, let's get you drunk first. And me, duh."

Jack pops the cork of the bottle and foam flies from the top, spilling all over the carpet by the couch and Jack's hand to boot. 

Rhys stuffs his face with the crackers he's given - feels like forever since his lunch break, and Jack takes a few from his hand to eat too. Eventually Jack reaches around Rhys to the glass table on the end of the couch and grabs two glasses, giving one to Rhys and holding the other himself. 

"So, when's the last time you got drunk, kiddo?"

"Huh. Few months ago, I think. Don't really have time for drinking when you're a grunt."

"Welp, now you've got some. Plenty of time up here for you to sit on your ass and get plastered. You eat enough?" Jack questions him while he pours his own glass, and Rhys nods. 

He's surprised when Jack takes the glass and pushes it to Rhys' lips instead of his own, swallowing reflexively as Jack tilts the glass. 

"How is it?" Jack's grinning at him, and Rhys licks his lips stupidly. 

"Good," he says, equally stupid while warmth floods his chest. It's a good feeling, he's missed that. 

Jack has him hold out his glass for him so he can pour it out for Rhys, who immediately goes on to sipping at it often enough that the burn in his throat is almost constant. 

He’s through his… uh, something, some number, he can’t remember, glass when he really starts to feel it, the heat going to his head instead of the opposite direction. Jack’s barely halfway through his first one; he seems content watching Rhys, who’s having enough trouble keeping his head up, let alone notice that Jack’s watching him so closely. 

Rhys feels liberated; he’s not thinking about what he saw through his new magic eye, he’s not thinking much of anything except Jack says something and he giggles a little, and then he’s standing up because his stomach needs to settle and also, he feels so much drunker when he’s upright. 

“Hey kiddo, where ya goin’?” 

“Nowhere,” he slurs, wobbling on his feet a little.

Jack sets down his glass on the floor by the couch but Rhys is still holding his loosely in one hand. Jack stands up with him, taking one arm and putting it around Rhys’ waist, his other hand coming to rest over the one Rhys is holding the glass in. 

“Hold that tighter, sweetheart. Don’t wanna step on broken glass if you drop it. Or you can finish that one off and we can put it down by mine, that’s it,” Jack purrs against his ear as Rhys tries downing the rest of what he’s got, which isn’t really a lot, so Jack doesn’t stop him from chugging it. It’s, like, three sips. Jack takes it from him then, places it on the floor in a position where they won’t step on it. 

Jack slides his free hand under Rhys’ shirt a little, popping his tie out of place in the process so it’s not tucked into his pants. 

“How you feeling?” Jack says as he runs his hand over his stomach, then his ribs, and Rhys makes a soft huff in response.

“Drunk,” he says eventually, “how much did I drink?” 

“You’ve got expensive taste,” Jack hums, pressing their chests closer together while Rhys gives an airy laugh. He can’t quite see straight and he’s flushed, his eye lit up to an icy blue in contrast. 

Rhys rests his forehead on Jack’s and Jack backs up a step, so Rhys stumbles forward because of that, not noticing the shock in his eyes. Too drunk to notice. Eventually the backs of Jack’s knees hit the couch and Jack decides his best bet is to just sit down and take Rhys with him, who goes easily enough.

Rhys seems to realize where he is, blinks, and then situates himself so that his knees are on either side of Jack’s hips. 

“Whoa, I’m on top of you.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts, kiddo.” 

Rhys grins at him, grins brighter when Jack’s hands find his thighs. “Could I get away with this if I wasn’t off my face?” 

“Nope,” Jack says quietly. 

“Okay, okay, what about this?”

Rhys kisses the side of Jack’s jaw, holding himself up by caging Jack in with both hands propped up on the couch behind him. He dots kisses up the length of his jaw until he gets to his ear, where he stops, pressing his cheek against Jack’s because he can’t hold his head up anymore. 

Jack doesn’t say anything, so Rhys picks himself up as much as he can so he can press their foreheads together again. That time, Jack doesn’t flinch away, he just stares at him.

“Cutting it a little close, Rhysie.” 

“Oh, am I? You gonna stop me?” He says it playfully, if a little slurred, and he’s absent-mindedly grinding his hips a little slowly against Jack. He brushes his lips against Jack’s and that’s when one of Jack’s hands pushes on his chest and forces him an inch or so away. 

“Should’a told me you were an aggressive drunk, pumpkin. But I guess a pleasant surprise is always nice, isn’t it?”

“Didn’t know I was,” Rhys confesses, laughing to himself. “Didn’t know I was a horny drunk, either. What kind of champagne was that?” 

“Good stuff,” Jack purrs, pulling Rhys down by the tie until their lips meet again. It’s a sloppy kiss, funny and weird and all kinds of drunk from Rhys’ end, he’s giddy and his lips are tingling from it. Rhys takes his hands away from the back of the couch and runs them through Jack’s hair instead, effectively making a mess of the twists and curls there in the process.

Jack stops kissing him, but he doesn’t take his mouth away so when he speaks, Rhys can feel it, too. “You’re a _brat_. Didn’t know you had it in you, cupcake.” 

“Course you did. You’d never have me around if I wasn’t a little like you, right? I’ve been an ass to you before and gotten away with it, you probably don’t even notice.” 

Jack bites his lip and Rhys yelps a little. 

“Ooh, you’ve got a pretty big ego for someone your size, champ,” Jack mocks, and Rhys sits there, perplexed. And his lip hurts.

Jack just told _him_ he had a big ego. 

He’s easily distracted from that, though, because Jack’s gripping his hips and forcing him down a little so he can get friction out of Rhys’ movements too. Rhys moans at first, a quiet little noise that barely makes it past his lips, but then he realizes how cramped up his knees feel from the weight he’s putting on them.

“We’re not fucking on the couch, Jack,” Rhys blurts out, and immediately feels like he should regret it, but can’t remember why. 

Jack growls at him, and Rhys can barely make it out, but he’s pretty sure he said _Language_. 

“Oh – “ Rhys gasps, suddenly sobered up, if for only a moment. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to, you – “

Jack covers his mouth with one hand, and if his heart wasn’t beating so fast in his chest from the initial scare of doing something he shouldn’t, Rhys would have laughed at how ridiculous Jack’s hair was, how disheveled he came across as. 

“Shh, sh, it’s okay, I’ll let that one pass,” Jack says distractedly as one of his hands slides over Rhys’ stomach, feeling him up a little. Rhys has never had any sort of muscle going on there but Jack doesn’t seem to care much, and eventually he takes his hand out and goes to undo the buttons of Rhys’ striped shirt, leaving his chest exposed. 

“Not _fucking_ on the couch, huh? Well, where’d you rather me screw you? Either way, it’s getting done, not a whole lot of room for options here unless you’d prefer the floor.” 

“I mean… uh, there’s the desk. I just wanna move my legs, knees hurt. Better than the floor.” 

“You wanna go doggy over my own freakin’ desk? Oh, kiddo, you’re a gift. You walk okay?” 

Rhys nods, sliding off of Jack’s lap.

\--  
Of course, Jack had a tube of lube taped to the side of his desk for emergencies like this one. 

Rhys is bent over the desk with his pants pooled down around his feet, and Jack’s currently got two fingers inside of him, working him open. His other hand is flat against his lower back, keeping him steady. 

“You doing okay, kiddo?”

“Everything’s blurry,” he whines as he moves back against Jack’s fingers, breaths ragged and uneven.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“That’s not funny,” Rhys groans but he laughs anyway – at least, until Jack’s fingers brush over his prostate, and Rhys’ laugh breaks off into a broken ‘ah’ sound. 

“Oh, did I find it?” He crooks his fingers so he hits it again and Rhys shivers, knees threatening to buckle from under him. 

“Y-yeah – hff – you did.” 

“That’s good, you keep your legs spread just like that, okay, pumpkin?”

“A-huh,” Rhys says dazedly, sighing pitifully as Jack pulls his fingers out and leaves him empty. Not that he takes that long to fix that. 

“There’s a good boy,” Jack growls as he lines himself up behind Rhys and pushes in carefully, almost a little too slow. Rhys is fine with it either way, trying to keep himself relaxed as Jack rocks his hips back, then forward, then back again, until he’s moving almost constantly at a steady rhythm that just about kills Rhys. 

It’s so, so satisfying.

“Let’s talk about what you’re gonna be doing for me – “ Jack pauses to bottom out, sighing to himself contentedly, “- at that party. You’re filling in for me, since I have an errand to run and I don’t feel like being fashionably late. So you’re gonna get yourself dressed up all nice and pretty, and you’re gonna parade around like my little puppet and scare everyone shitless, ‘cause you’re my assistant, and you’re respected, pumpkin. Even more than that, they’re scared of you. Got a vibe about you, like some alpha dog. Got it from me.” 

Rhys is too busy clouding up the desk with his own harsh breaths to reply verbally but he nods as best as he can, rocks back as Jack moves in the opposite direction so they meet in the middle together. 

“Don’t look like an alpha dog right now, though.”

Rhys can hear the grin in his voice but he doesn’t have time to say anything back because Jack chooses that moment to ram into him hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and Rhys gets dizzy. 

Not that he wasn’t already dizzy, but, still. He sees stars, and he’s not even facing the window. 

“While we’re in the middle of this, I just wanna say how pretty you are like this, all drunk and ruined, it’s a nice look for you. Wish I had a camera on me, I really do. Hey, gorgeous, you listening?”

“Oh, sh- shoot, yeah, I’m – I’m listening, just, you’re going really f-fast,” he barely gets the last word out before he’s moaning again, loud and unrestrained. He’s too out of it to care how loud he is. 

Their pace continues for a while, Jack making soft noises of appreciation behind him while Rhys gives his own sounds, and he remembers the last time he’d ended up here, bent over Jack’s desk like this – it feels like so long ago because it _was_ , when Jack left him like this, left him to sit there and contemplate his life and doubt himself.

This time, Rhys has nothing to contemplate, and he knows Jack won’t leave him.

Rhys gives one deep, long, and happy sigh. He’s never felt greater. 

\--

“Wanna finish,” Rhys says eventually, desperately, “I can’t – I can’t reach.” He’s too close to the desk for him to be able to get his hand between his legs himself, and he makes a loud, confused huff when Jack grabs him by the hips and pulls him back a little.

“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” Jack says sweetly, taking his hand and getting it around Rhys’ dick for him instead. That in itself is almost enough to help him along to the point he’s done for, he’s almost there, so close he can feel his thighs shaking in anticipation.

After a few strokes he _is_ done for, and Jack mutters praises into his ear, and it’s all too much for him.

When he cums all over Jack’s hand the lights in the room flicker, 

“You’re gonna do so well,” Jack whispers to himself from behind him.


	12. I Hate This Chapter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> snow and i wrote different scraps of this and just put it together and edited around, so you might not be able to tell who is who. i hate this chapter with every ounce of my being, don't know why, don't care, but for some reason i haven't been able to write for DAYS because of it and i need to get it over with. there was so much i wanted from this chapter and all my inspiration died as i wrote it. i hope you all at least like some of it, though. it'll get good again, i promise! at least, i really hope so. this was just the hurdle chapter to get to the plot, so that's probably why i wanted it over with so bad. anyway, sorry for the God Awfulness of this chap (at least, with the parts not written by snow), and sorry for taking so long to update
> 
> P.S. just wanna make a quick reminder that rhys has two human arms in this au! they didn't screw with his right one. ;3c
> 
> P.S.S. i wanna say thank you to snow for being a constant inspiration for my writing. this wouldn't get done without you. ilu

"So how come you can't go?" Rhys huffs uncomfortably as Jack straightens out his tie, and he doesn't seem toff be paying attention to Rhys at first. 

Rhys hates suits; not that he looks bad in them, no, he looks fine, awesome even, they're just not his favorite to wear. And he feels kind of ridiculous and out of place - Jack gave him a flashy yellow tie to go with the thing and he feels like a beacon for a party he doesn’t want to be front and center in, and he hasn't even made it to the party yet. 

But Jack picked it out, so none of it really matters, it feels like an honor just to be wearing something Jack had specifically done up just for him. 

"That's classified, kiddo," Jack says proudly, tugging on the thing one more time, so hard that Rhys gasps a little. "But I'll be back before you know it, won't be more than an hour - so hang tight, make me look good, do your best, blah blah blah, expensive booze, drink your heart out, don't need to suck up to anyone because I'm everyone's boss and you're there as me, get it?"

"Yeah," Rhys says breathlessly. It's a lot to take in - he's still not sure if he's dreaming or not. 

His dreams were becoming more and more lucid, so he's still not sure, even later.

Either way this entire thing is setting his nerves on edge, mostly because he doesn't know if there's some form of etiquette he's supposed to follow or what to talk about or anything about parties in general, because he's not usually invited to any and most of the time what he considers a "party" is sharing beers with Vaughn while they eat pizza and watch some crappy Hyperion-issued program. That's so much simpler than this. 

"You're not the host so you can just enjoy yourself, kiddo; some guy, I dunno, Blake, he just wants everyone to be there. Celebrating some tourist-y things, I guess. We don't, like, interact that much, so you don't have to worry about doing the same. Might not even be around until later. Just stick to the buffet, kid. Have fun, like I said, look good..." He takes a moment to glance up and down Rhys. "Well, we've got that part down. Kill 'em, tiger. You don't have to stay for the whole thing, just long enough to show off your stuff, 'Kay?"

"'Kay," Rhys says quietly, a little flustered. He’s not even sure what his ‘stuff’ is, anyway. 

Oh, wait. His robot stuff.

Jack leaves him to fend for himself and get to the party on his own. He wishes he’d thought to invite Vaughn, because that would have made this so much easier. But Vaughn’s always been his crutch, so it’s time for something else, obviously – time to be his own man, or whatever.

Even though he’s technically just a Jack replacement for the next couple of hours.

\--

Rhys makes it to the party unharmed, and is immediately struck by how gorgeous it is. The entire ceiling is a glass bubble, and even though he’s seen nothing but stars for years while he worked on Helios, he’s never been struck by their beauty so much as that very second, not even the first time he got a glimpse of them from the space station when he arrived. 

“Wow,” he says to himself, just noticing that the whole place is covered in red, gold, and black, not a bit of white to be seen. Even the lights are tinted pink, and if the whole place wasn’t the breeding grounds for murder and betrayal he would have found it all the more stunning. 

He doesn’t recognize a single person, however; probably because he’s never met any of them and they’re all higher ranked than him – or, on the chain, Rhys guesses he’s pretty high up now, but before… before he was just some guy. 

Now he’s Handsome Jack’s assistant.

That gives him some confidence, he’s not gonna lie.

“Right?” 

“What?” Rhys says, looking around, sort of startled. He comes face to face with a man he’s never seen before, but he kind of shrinks away from him; he looks important. 

Rhys remembers the assistant thing and quickly straightens up, trying to look big again.

“The view. Always surprises the newbies. Hey, you’re Jack’s new-ish assistant, right?”

“Yeah, as of a few months ago. Why?”

“Just wondering; I wanted to meet the guy who managed to go through all that crap and still lived. You’ve got guts, kid. And you managed to get all of this – “ He points at the port and his eye, and then whistles. “- You’re one lucky bastard. You can cheat death pretty damn well, that’s for sure.”

“What do you mean?” 

“About what?”

“The… cheating death thing. What do my cybernetics have to do with any of that?”

“Well, that must not have been very safe, right? I mean, most of the guys up here know about that procedure because it… felt sort of like a joke before they actually managed to do it to someone, the being conscious part, the whole reason they never wanted to try it on anyone important, y’know.” 

“I… don’t think I was conscious, I don’t remember any of that.”

“Oh.” Something sparks in his eyes, but he doesn’t go further. “Anyway, enjoy the party. Don’t mind how the people stare, they always do that with the new ones.”

Rhys’ train of thought suddenly skids to a stop. Staring? Nobody was staring, not that he noticed. He didn’t want to look around and find out for himself, though, so his mind immediately flips back to the conversation of his cybernetics. “But – “He stops when he sees that the other man has left him alone to go talk to some others, somewhere, probably, and that confuses him even more. 

The thought of him actually being conscious must have been a joke; he can’t remember any of it, but he guesses it couldn’t have been that bad. They were probably just trying to mess with him, and they picked that guy to come up and talk to him about it. Just to scare him. Yeah, that was it.

He makes his way to the bar like Jack said he could and takes a glass of champagne for himself. It’s not nearly as good as what Jack gave him the other night – he doubts anything could be as good, not nearly as expensive, and the very fact that he can taste how expensive it is is just putting him off from the whole thing. He and Vaughn promised to never turn into Hyperion snobs so long ago, and Rhys is determined to hold up to that. He’s content to stay at the bar for as long as he can, not even drinking, really, just sitting there, because it seems to be a place where he won’t be interrupted. 

So he does sit there, for a while. Trying his damned hardest to figure out what happened to him before his cybernetics. But that big old wall is still there, as per usual, and he’s too nervous and distracted by the constant talking around him to try and break through it. He doesn’t think he can, anyway. So there he is, at the bar, cranky almost-enjoying the champagne in his hand. 

He doesn’t know how long he sits there for, zoned out and ignoring the chatter around him, but when a noise starts up in the back of his head he almost holds his glass so hard it shatters. His eye whirrs to life without his say-so, and he can hear Jack sigh. At least, he thinks it’s Jack. It couldn’t be anyone else.

_Hey, kiddo! Guess who’s back?_

“Jack?” He says under his breath. “You weren’t even gone that long! You could’ve come here yourself!”

_Yeah, but, I wanted you to go. Mingle with the guys I don’t wanna mingle with. You meet anyone yet?_

“No, not except for one guy, but I didn’t get his name. I think he was trying to scare me.”

_Huh. Well, next time they try that, you remind them that if you want, they’ll be dead in the next couple of minutes. Don’t worry about them, kiddo. Not having a good time, I guess?_

“No, I’m not. And I’m not getting anyone killed.”

_Well, that’s probably because you’ve been sitting at the bar looking like a lonely, sad drunk for who-knows-how-long, jeez, kiddo. Live a little._

“How do you know I’m at the bar?”

Him essentially talking to himself has kind of gotten some attention from two ladies standing near him, and they’re looking at him a little funny. He shifts awkwardly in his seat.

_Aw, someone doesn’t like attention, huh? I forgot to tell you something about this tech, pumpkin. You know I can see through your eye, don’t tell me you forgot, but I don’t think I showed you that I can check your heart rate, too. Whoopsie. It did a couple flips when I first started watching, though, didn’t it?_

“That’s because you’re – you’re talking in my head! That’s not exactly a normal thing for me, Jack.”

_Oh, it’s going up again!_

Rhys glares at the glass in his hand and gets up. One of the girls eyes him funny.

_Ooh, they_ are _staring, aren’t they? I bet everyone else is, too. Why don’t you look around?_

Rhys does look, and everywhere his eyes go he finds people deliberately not looking at him, like they were just looking at him moments before. Rhys feels his face heating up, and the sensation that people are staring at his back.

_You’re special, aren’t you? You know that, they know that, psh, I know that, you’re so different, kiddo. That’s why I wanted you to go for me. You’re like a friggin’ trophy. They’re staring ‘cause they’re jealous._

Rhys smiles to himself. 

\--

He does end up making friends. Nobody at the party is exchanging names like he thought they would, so he’s yet to know a single person by name but they all know who he is and that gives him a rush he’s never felt before. A sense of superiority he feels is inappropriate but somehow the most appropriate any feeling has ever been. 

Once, a small group comes up to him, and one of the girls gets way too close to his eye, so close he can feel her breath. He ends up accidentally scanning her, because he doesn’t have full control over how the thing works just yet, and she’s fascinated. They all are. He sees her profession, her mood… and her name, which makes him feel like he’s cheating. She’s excited; that’s what he focuses on, while she focuses on his eye. 

She presses close to him and her friends giggle behind her.

Jack pipes in on the other end, voice tinted with a possessive growl that Rhys barely notices.

_Down, boy. You’re drunk and she’s not worth your time._

Rhys snaps out of it and backs away a few steps, smiling sheepishly at the group. The girl looks peeved but not too peeved, which is good, he doesn’t want to disappoint anyone, but – jeez, what just happened? There’s music playing, not dancing music but music that’s loud enough to pound where his heart does, and yeah, he’s definitely drunk. He’s not used to feeling like this around so many people. 

Jack seems hell-bent on getting his attention back. 

_You know what I just realized? This thing would make for pretty damn good radio sex._

Rhys freezes where he stands, and pulls a face. 

It’s all Jack says, and he sounded like he was talking to himself in the first place, so Rhys doesn’t talk back or try to get any sort of information out of him. He’s too busy, buzzed from alcohol and from the attention he’s getting from so many people who make his weight in money every month. It’s amazing.

\--

The next time Jack comes through in the back of his head, it’s with a small, breathy sigh, and a quiet, satisfied, _Hey._

It… It sounds like he just jerked off. Or something along those lines.

“Jack? Did you just, uh…?”

Jack laughs on the other end, and it comes out just as lazy and sated as the rest of what he’s heard so far.

_Getting there, yeah. Why?_

Oh.

“Okay. Uh. No reason.”

This isn’t happening. He’s too drunk, it can’t be real. 

_I just figured, y’know, since I’m basically just sitting here, bored, until you get back from the party, and you’re the_ only _one who can hear me, I may as well get in some ‘Me’ time._

Rhys laughs a little, and gets quieter to make sure nobody can hear him. This is… totally happening.

“And ‘Me Time’ involves jerking off over a two-way communicator that cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars?”

_Yep._

“Alright.”

He takes a quick look around the room. He doesn’t seem to have drawn much attention talking to Jack, as everyone’s satisfied to leave him alone for just a little while after numerous instances of people touching his port (which, he finds out very quick, is just as inappropriate as when Jack touches it and feels just as good, so he tries to discourage people from doing it), so he relaxes a little bit about getting caught.

“I hope you weren’t expecting me to join in, since I’m already running an errand for you.”

Jack laughs again, but it’s starting to sound less like his usual steady voice.

_Nah, pumpkin, you’re needed over there._

Rhys is relieved for about two seconds before Jack breathes out a moan, lighter and almost sounding sort of desperate.

_Doesn’t mean you can’t listen, though._

He wants to laugh at how ridiculous this is, but he’s too distracted by Jack. None of the noises he’s making are ones Rhys has heard before; he’s honestly kind of suspicious that maybe this is a joke, that everyone’s just screwing with him tonight, and Jack is sending him audio of someone else jerking off just to see if Rhys is that gullible.

He gulps down another sip of the drink in his hand. He’s paranoid that somehow they all know what he’s listening to, because Jack’s breathing and panting is so loud and _good_ in his head that it almost sounds like he’s right behind him.

After a near-minute-long series of whines and quick huffs of breath wrapped up with shaky panting as he stops touching himself so he doesn’t cum just yet, Rhys has to ask.

“Jack, is that… Is that _actually_ you?”

It sounds like Jack tries to laugh on the other end, but all that comes through is more shaky breath, just formed through his nose to differentiate it from any other huff.

Then he _hums_ , still half a moan as he makes an affirmative ‘mmhmm’, and that hits him harder than anything else, because now he _knows_ it’s been Jack.

“Why haven’t I gotten to hear these noises before, huh?” It comes off more bossy than curious, but Jack knows he’s a little buzzed from all the free booze; he won’t give him crap for it until later.

_Maybe ‘cause … I… hah, I dunno, can’t think of a reason. Maybe ‘cause I’m the one who’s usually doing all the work for you. Don’t get time for myself._

“That’s a lie; I suck you off more than you do anything for me.” He says, miffed, and he says it so quiet that he really, really hopes that only Jack could hear that. 

_Shh, kiddo, I’m busy._

Rhys goes quiet, but that only makes it worse. The noises persist, pants rising into quiet whines as Jack forgets Rhys is even there. 

He can hear his feet shuffling on the floor a little bit, he can hear him spread his legs further. They’re all muted noises but he knows the sounds well enough, and Rhys really, really wishes he wasn’t at this party. He wishes he was back in that office.

But then, Jack wouldn’t be making those noises. He’s giving him a pretty good gift just by doing this over their weird communication line – Rhys guesses he bottles up those noises to look cool, but he’s not trying to look cool for Rhys right now – it’s amazing. But still, he wishes he wasn’t at the party. Because he can’t jerk off to Jack’s noises at the party. 

Eventually, Jack gives a long, satisfied groan. It’s quiet but not forced quiet, and Rhys shivers. Jack doesn’t talk for a bit, but he can hear some of his breaths through the communicator. It’s enough for him to _really_ wish he was back in that office with him. 

They really need to expand on the phone sex thing.

Though, he’s not flustered for long, isn’t allowed to dwell on the noises that fell into his head, to really think about how he could possibly repeat those noises from Jack again, because, well. He's sobered up the second he hears it. It kills the mood completely, shatters it as soundly as anything could.

"I don't agree with his methods," all hushed down. "I'm sorry, I’m sorry - but I can't do this anymore."

"Be quiet," another voice says, terrified and higher pitched. 

"He's murdering children, with his own _hands_. He's murdering kids - I mean, the guy's methods work, but I dunno, I'm not liking this. I'm not liking this at all. It’s one thing to shove a guy out of an airlock for being so incompetent you don’t deserve to be here but this… this was supposed to be about saving Pandora from savagery, not slaughtering a bunch of innocents who stand in the way of some stores of underground resources. A couple of people have already left, down in those cannons, we should follow suit. They won’t go looking for us, not if we stay quiet. We'd be safer down there than here anyway. As long as we stay away from where they find support – there’s a place down on Pandora I heard of a few weeks ago, a revolution -" 

The guy's voice is rising to a slightly dramatic, drunken pitch.

“ – and I don’t think Jack can take on all of Pandora. I’d rather be on the other side before they blow Helios to bits.”

“We’re safe up here, that’s what matters, but we won’t be if you keep running your mouth, jackass - that planet is full of bandits who’d never think twice about… and…”

Rhys is distracted by the voice interrupting in his head. The calculated, calm voice that sounds nothing like he just jerked off. 

_Go over there._

Rhys can feel sweat gathering at his palms as he turns around and closes the distance. 

_Don't forget to smile, Rhys. Ask his name for me, won't you, pumpkin?_

Something's wrong and Rhys knows it, he knows that by walking over he's signing up for something he doesn't think he's ready to be signed up for, his gut tells him so and he's inclined to believe it. His gut's never wrong. 

He puts on a smile anyway, shakes hands with the guy fondly. His whole demeanor had changed the moment they'd made eye contact, and the two who've been talking with one another exchange nervous glances before turning back to him with the best Hyperion faces they could muster after saying something like that. 

Rhys pretends he hadn't heard, makes small talk for a while - he's not perfect at it, so it goes kind of awkward, a few random silences do nothing for his nerves and even though under all this secondhand fear he's still drunk enough to not feel the gravity of his decision to ask the guy's name. Something about it is wrong, though. 

Not wrong enough to keep him from asking. 

And the guy does tell him. Like that’s somehow going to make the situation even better. 

They shake hands, too. It feels awful; they’re both shaking. 

Jack makes a satisfied hum at the back of his head, and doesn’t elaborate. 

_You tired, kiddo?_

"A little," Rhys says out loud, under his breath as he gives his goodbyes; and before he can really breathe, Jack clicks his tongue. 

_Well, don't let that bum you out – you wanna come on back now?_

“Yeah,” he says, a little down. He makes one last trip to the bar and gets as much alcohol as he can take and still be able to walk back without tripping all over himself. Probably not a good idea, but he’s just full of bad decisions tonight.

It’s a long walk. He’s not even exaggerating; it takes him a long time to get anywhere, and he’s more concentrated on thinking than he is on walking.

No one ever told him about anything involving innocent people.

Or a revolution.

Or anything.

Of course, the guy could be exaggerating – Jack had his reasons, and Rhys isn’t inclined to believe anyone from Pandora, or anything they say. He’s been brought up right – by Jack, by Hyperion, by everyone, he knew that they were all awful, horrible, vicious people, and if they… if they had to be wiped out, that was better for everyone, wasn’t it?

Rhys couldn’t answer himself. 

And luckily he didn’t have to, his thoughts cut off just as the doors to Jack’s office open and he’s free from thought, Jack’s pestering him the moment he walks in the door, and he’s still buzzed enough that he can toss that thought out the window just by wishing it was gone.

So it’s gone. Forever.

Jack gets up from his desk to help Rhys along, who’s stumbling both in exhaustion and, well, drunk exhaustion. Jack doesn’t say a word to him but the atmosphere isn’t crackling with discontent the way it normally would had Jack been angry for any reason. 

No, he’s not angry. He’s carefully untying Rhys’ tie, alleviating the uncomfortable pressure there by taking it off. 

“Hey, kiddo, you still with me?” Jack says quietly, reaching up with both hands to cup his face, lightly smacking him with one of them to get his attention.

“Yeah, “ Rhys gives in return, focusing bleary vision on Jack’s face.

“You trust me, pumpkin?”

“What? Of course I do, Jack. I trust you.” 

Jack grins, and Rhys can’t see any maliciousness behind it. Not a single ounce. “Good, good. Awesome, knew you did. Why don’t you come in late tomorrow? I got a surprise for you and you look like you’re about to keel over and die, must’a been some party, huh?”

“You were there for most of it.”

“Meh, it’s a lot less fun when you’re watching it through someone else’s eye. Let’s get you home.”


	13. ●

Rhys does get the sleep he needs, and there’re no dreams involved. It’s the most peaceful sleep he’s had in a long while, so much better than before and all those times when he had those dreams he couldn’t for the life of him explain, and didn’t want to. He much preferred locking those away just as he locked the events of the party in the back of his mind.

But besides that, he got a solid ten hours, and he’s never felt better.

He feels like this day is going to be the best day of his life.

Rhys makes coffee for himself in his apartment before heading out – Jack doesn’t know he’s awake yet so he assumes he can lag behind, and Vaughn is already gone. Seeing Vaughn less and less has taken a toll on him he’s almost embarrassed to admit, but they still talk just enough to keep him mostly satisfied with their relationship. Vaughn understands how much his job strains him, and Rhys finds comfort in the fact that Vaughn, for whatever reason, actually loves his job. Guy has a weird thing for numbers, he’s a master.

Rhys would say he’s the looks of the two of them, but since he’s seen Vaughn without a shirt on, he keeps his mouth shut.

So he enjoys his coffee in peace, gets ready in peace, and revels in the fact that Jack’s got something to show him and he’s allowed to be late. That’s, like, the best possible scenario, and it gives him time to think about the positive things of working for Jack instead of the negative he’s been so drawn to lately. Everyone has flaws, he’s resigned to think, and Jack is under all sorts of pressure to be perfect. Considering he’s… well, something obviously happened to his face that really hurt him, Rhys thinks he’s entitled to quite a lot. It looks like it hurt to have something branded onto your face.

He’s not technically supposed to know that, and he hopes that Jack never finds out that he knows. It’s something intimate that Jack hasn’t shared with him knowingly – unless he purposely got Rhys into a position to scan him so he could see, but, no, he wouldn’t do that. Not with something so serious. He’d be upfront about it, of course he would, Jack’s always upfront when it comes to talking to him about things.

Always.

And the man, the first one he spoke to – he had no idea what he was talking about. They wanted to scare him by saying that everyone knew about the project beforehand, that they didn’t want to try out the cybernetics on someone not “important”, he’d definitely implied that Rhys wasn’t important, right? God, what an asshole. Jack was the only one who knew about the cybernetics before he’d actually gotten them, Rhys knew that; they’d just come up with some story about how he was disposable after they saw him running around with cybernetics they’d never be good enough to have and got jealous that they weren’t as important as he was.

And is. Rhys still is important, and always would be. Jack made that clear enough.

Rhys takes his time getting to Jack’s office, putting his hands in his pockets and strolling along like nothing matters. It’s a good feeling, very liberating – his first party went without too much of a hitch even if it wasn’t all that fun – he supposes that Hyperion parties are never fun but they’re mandatory for most of the higher-ups, like unofficial meetings and such. If you show up you get more money… or something like that. Rhys made a mental note to tell Vaughn that Hyperion parties are severely overrated and they should host one in their little apartment themselves and get drunk off the cheap beer they always have, just for old times’ sake.

 

\--

 

When he does finally make it down there, Rhys isn’t aware of what he’s seeing at first. He makes it a few steps in from the doorway, hears a noise that sounds like gagging, and he keeps walking because it’s a long walk from the door to Jack’s desk, and then stops just short when he gets a clear view of what’s behind Jack’s desk, facing the window.

The man from the party, the one who talked of revolution and innocence, is on the floor, sobbing behind his own tie as a gag. He looks battered up, a deep purple bruise covering up one of his eyes entirely. It’s obscured by the tears flowing down both his cheeks – he looks like he’s trying to say something, over and over again, but nothing is coming out. Jack’s in the middle of hauling him by the collar up onto his knees, until he perks up as Rhys comes closer.

“Jack?” Rhys says nervously, and Jack looks at him with the brightness of a cat that just brought him a half-dead mouse as a gift.

He hops over the desk, for the most part, and grabs Rhys by both shoulders. He sounds out of breath when he talks. “Rhys, kiddo, hey, remember that present we talked about? I’m gonna give you the honors of doing something I’ve been itching to do since, like, last night. I mean, I’ve always had my eyes on this guy – he looks around too much like he’s got something to hide, and I guess you proved that last night.”

The more he talks, the more serious he gets. That’s Rhys’ only indication that he’s not kidding, because he’s not smiling by the time he gets the last few words out.

Rhys stares at him, open-mouthed. “I don’t – “

“Yeah, yeah, I know, never done this before, but I promise, it’s a lot easier than it looks.” He’s maneuvering Rhys around the desk and Rhys is going only because it’s not in his thought process to run, since he’s on a space station and he’s never had to run before. He doesn’t see that as an option here.

“It took a lot of patience, not shooting the guy’s brains out a couple minutes ago, especially before I gagged him,” Jack starts as the man continues sobbing, not facing them, “but I really, really wanted to wait for you.”

There’s a pistol sitting on the desk that Rhys hadn’t noticed before, a tiny thing painted entirely black save for a gold stripe streaking down the sides.

He’s too shaken up to do anything about it when Jack places it in his hands with both his own, getting him to hold it the way he would if he were to actually shoot someone. Then, Jack moves behind him, gently pushing on his elbows until they’re bent in the right position.

“Jack? Jack, I’m – I’m not sure I know what… what you want me to do here. I can’t shoot someone.”

“Yeah you can, it’s not too hard, I promise. I’ll help you through it, huh? You’ve already got your hands up right, that’s a good start, precious.” Jack moves to hold one of his hips; the other hand pulling his shirt out of his pants so that he can get under it and run his hand over his stomach. Jack lets his chin rest on Rhys’ shoulder, talking in his ear from then on. “The sound won’t be too loud, that’s one of my personal guns – doesn’t make that obnoxious noise, you can focus more on the sound of it hitting home.”

Rhys shivers, and to Jack, that registers as something positive. He squeezes his hip harder, almost in reassurance, and moves to kiss his neck once, and then his cheek, before whispering in his ear. “It’s okay, just pull the trigger, look,” Jack puts his finger over Rhys’ but doesn’t push, “just tighten up your finger and it’ll go, it’s not that hard, sweetheart, you can do it.”

Rhys breathes harshly through his nose as Jack puts his finger over his, expecting him to actually put enough pressure over his own finger to make it fire. He doesn’t, though – he’s going to make Rhys do it.

Rhys can’t kill a guy – he can’t. Not when they’ve… he didn’t… he didn’t do anything wrong, and Rhys had gotten his name from him – he’d walked up to him and asked for his name and talked to him about his life and his job, he was a real person.

“I can’t,” he mutters, shaking his head desperately. “Jack, I can’t do this. Don’t make me do this. He – he just said a few things while he was drunk, everyone does that – “

“Hey, hey, shh, don’t do that. Don’t think about it. You’ll feel a lot better afterwards, I promise, you’ll know what it’s like after you do it and it’ll be all better, huh, champ? Thought you trusted me?”

“I do, Jack, I do trust you, but this is – “

“Well, it shouldn’t be a problem if you trust me. This man and the bandits like him are what’s keeping Pandora from being a safe place, you hear me? It’s guys like these that are keeping you from living a life on a planet that’s actually freakin’ habitable and breathing some fresh goddamn air, from keeping me from saving the planet like I want to. I have mercy. I won’t torture him; I won’t drag his guts across the desert like all the people on Pandora are more than willing to do. He doesn’t see it, but we’re giving him something better. Go on, go ahead. ”

For lack of a better word he shoots, the sound echoing throughout the whole room, the squelching of brain and skull as they shatter beneath the force of the bullet filling the air, blood flying from the point of impact and spraying onto his shoes and the back of the guy’s head and every surface in between, and all the while Jack’s holding onto his hip, grounding him and keeping him steady.

Except he didn’t do any of that.

He’s still standing there, shaking, tears forming in his eyes from fear, and the gun’s not smoking.

He can’t do it, and he can’t trick himself into thinking otherwise.

His fingers go slack and the gun drops from his hands as he issues a wrecked sob, the pistol clattering to the floor enough to scare him into jumping back. He doesn’t get far, though, because Jack’s still behind him.

Until he moves away from Rhys to pick the gun up off the tile, scooping it up in one hand, spinning the gun in his hand once, as artfully as he can in the situation, then aiming at the top of the guy’s head.

When he shoots, Rhys yelps; but that noise is crushed by both the gunshot itself and the sound of blood splattering on the glass… and then, subsequently, the lifeless body thumping solidly against the floor.

He’s terrified into silence as Jack stands there with the gun and Rhys stands there with his eyes wide and both of them refuse to move.

Jack breaks the barrier first, rolling his shoulders and then turning back to Rhys.

“See?” He says, shrugging, before placing the gun back down on the desk and holding his hands up as he walks carefully towards Rhys, who backs up a step.

“Hey, kiddo, it’s over,” and he closes enough distance to twine his arms around Rhys’ waist. They’re both shaking but Jack feels like he’s literally vibrating from adrenaline or pride or whatever the hell has got him so worked up after that, while Rhys is shaking because he’s in plain shock. “That wasn’t so bad, c’mon. You just have to do it once, and then you’ll get it, killer. I know it’s pretty jarring, but so was my first time.” He sighs against Rhys’ neck, and Rhys sniffles quietly. “You’ll get used to it, I promise.”

Jack thinks he’s afraid of the gun.

He’s not afraid of the gun, he’s afraid of Jack.


	14. Twisted Nerve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry.
> 
> i love YOU guys, if that helps.

Everything is fine.

Someone comes down to wipe the blood off the tile and windows a little too late; it’s dried and crusted onto respective surfaces and turned a ghastly dark maroon, and Rhys has the _pleasure_ of working at the desk while the smells of cleaner and blood mix in the air. He’d gag, but Jack is watching him. And he can’t stop staring – the sight of streaks of blood obscuring stars is something he never wants to see again, but he can’t get the image out of his mind. 

After that, everything is fine.

Washing his hands in the bathroom is fine, because even though he overhears two whispered voices behind him explaining to one another that Jack is different now, that Jack keeps changing and he’s been different ever since the events that led up to his new position, it doesn’t get to him. Rhys doesn’t get it, he doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t want to, because everything is fine.

Walking the halls of Helios is fine. He’s never noticed the looks he gets from others before but now it’s so prominent – the slight shift in direction people take when they meet him in the halls, the aversion of eyes, the way people so often avoid any sort of contact with him. Like he’s poison. Untouchable poison; were they to touch him, they’d face the same bloody fate as those who crossed Jack, who crossed the very top of Hyperion, and they were so, so scared. He takes up the habit of scanning them in the halls as they pass, catching the thoughts of general queasiness and pity they get from crossing paths with Rhys, Handsome Jack’s Oblivious Assistant. It makes him want to shrivel up and die right where he stands each time the feedback is relayed to him through his eye.

He’s not oblivious.

Not anymore.

He’d never thought it would be this way – he’d always taken the job as some sort of privilege, something that made him stand higher than everyone else, untouchable in the best of ways, but never repulsive. He’d never thought of Jack as a truly bad person – weeding out the wicked, he’d always done, was how Rhys had seen it up until now; doing the good of Helios, of Pandora, of every planet he’d ever touched and would touch. Jack had never hurt him or anyone close to him so Rhys had deemed it unimportant, as unimportant as unimportant could get. 

But it was fine. All of it was absolutely, incredibly, entirely fine. 

The murders done on Helios were done behind closed doors; Rhys had never seen another human life taken in front of him, and definitely hadn’t imagined it to be something so viciously simple. The simplicity of it doesn’t confuse him – Jack told him himself that he’d done it to spare the man from living a life of torture at the hands of bandits, but it scares him nonetheless. It traumatized him, for lack of a better word. He’d always thought of himself as someone who could handle things, who could handle trauma, who could handle Hyperion, but he couldn’t fool himself the moment it happened, can’t fool himself as his hands shake days after the event, as his stomach still hurts with the need to vomit each time it crosses his mind. But he can fool himself into thinking that everything is fine, just for old time’s sake. 

Everything is fine when he spends his nights in Jack’s office, working harder than he ever has before, trying to cover up the fact that Jack shook him, mentally, like a chew toy the day he decided to show him the wondrous process of murder. He takes it as Jack starts getting more and more unpredictable, because he notices, he notices everything. When he tries putting Rhys back into the spot that he’d made for him to fill in the first place, he shakes Rhys harder. He’s shaking and shaking and shaking, and Rhys can only take so much.

Their sex slowly turns into biting teeth, bruising thighs, and days of uncomfortable soreness. Jack leaves his bottom lip bloody and swollen on multiple occasions, without noticing, because Rhys wipes it away every time. Jack holds his hips too hard, leaving marks in the shape of fingerprints that Rhys traces over with his own fingers hours after. Jack whispers in hushed tones of teaching Rhys the beauty of the chain and showing him the progress he’s made through murder, through blood, through guts and organs and death, now that they’ve bridged the gap by forcing Rhys to see it with his own eyes. Jack tells him how to kill a man, a woman, a child; Jack confides in him the dirtiest secrets, leaving Rhys wondering whether _this_ time will be the time he kills Rhys too, to cover up those secrets, and move on to the next assistant to come his way. And then repeat the process; tell them the same secrets he whispers into his ear when there are no witnesses but the stars that surround the office.

Rhys doesn’t sleep for a while. He comes to work with bags under his eyes, with the weight of a thousand things on his back. Sure, everything is fine, after each new thing he hears now that he’s actually _looking_ , after every new fact about Jack he discovers, but he sleeps less and less until he’s running on coffee and nothing else. Literally, too. He’s not eating, either. It’s too demanding to eat. 

When he does finally start sleeping again, it’s dissatisfying. When he does sleep he doesn’t dream, he hasn’t dreamt in a while, but the problem is his waking moments. He has sort-of-dreams, little snippets of bits he doesn’t remember, of bright lights and almost-blackouts and the harsh sting of a drill in the side of his head. He doesn’t know what these memories are or if they’re real or just a culmination of every wicked thing he’s scanned out of each person he crosses across Helios, but they’re real to him. The vague feeling that Jack leaves out the whole truth whenever possible creeps in and sets deep in his skull the way his cybernetics do, and he can’t… he can’t get rid of it. Each time he sees Jack he wants to ask him, ask him why he can’t remember what happened to him during the surgery, because he sure as hell doesn’t remember getting knocked out. But something stops him every time, ties his tongue up into billions of knots.

But apart from the sleepless nights, the tossing and turning, the jumping out of bed every time he feels phantom pains in his tech, everything is fine.

Everything stops being fine the day Jack slaps him. 

It’s harder than a firm slap. It’s harder than any slap should be. It’s meant to knock Rhys out of the pit he’s placed himself in, meant to fix him or… or something, he knows Jack still cares about him; it has to be for a good reason, obviously, but it only makes him worse. He’s never been hit before. He’s never experienced a lot of things before. But one hard slap to the face that leaves blood rushing to his cheek in the shape of Jack’s hand is enough for a lifetime, he thinks. 

But things become fine again, right as rain, when Jack apologizes, tells him why he thought of it in the first place, tells him about how he wants to teach him about the world. He spends the rest of the day coddling him, treating him like a prince and telling him the good things about his goals, and that time, the sex doesn’t end in blood, because Rhys asks for it not to be. 

The longer Rhys stays, the more he understands about Jack. He picks up the same habit he had in scanning the strangers and uses the same tactic on Jack, but only when he’s not looking. He’d been warned, he thinks, against doing that.

It tells him all sorts of things.

All sorts of bloody, violent things.

\----

Everything is not fine.

The first night that Rhys goes home and throws up into the toilet, he knows it’s bad. 

The accumulation of negative things he’s gotten from Jack and from outside sources is ruining him, and he feels like he’s been swallowing tar. He’s tired of hiding that. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t shaping his personality, but that’s an undeniable fact – it is, and he’s so sick, so sick of denying it. Denying everything he feels.

He’s snappy, he’s irritable, he’s thinking of murder more and more often, a constant voice in his head telling him things without sound. He thinks about all sorts of things he’s never dreamed of thinking before, unfiltered and unfettered by morals. He notices it first when he overhears three men clad in expensive suits discussing business practices, and the way they talk about Jack gives him illusions of walking over there and snapping each of their necks, and he’s embarrassed at the fact that he _drools_ over that. 

It takes so, so long to snap himself out of the mindset of _Jack_. 

But each and every time one of the lower employees mentions an uprising on Pandora, he finds himself listening like a dog with one ear cocked toward the sound of treats shaking in a box. He’s so conflicted, he’ll probably burst from it.

And the tipping point, he thinks, is when he hears about Helena Pierce. 

People kill people all the time up on Helios. The thing is, it’s optional. Rhys never had the guts to do it, never had the need to do it, never wanted to do it, so he didn’t do it. Not playing into the game was opting out, and as far as track records went, Rhys was pretty clean. That’s probably the only reason he’s still alive and everyone else is tearing one another apart in the name of corporate business. But it’s fair, for the most part. Fair enough that murder isn’t a crime but knocking over a trash can is. The only reason it traumatized Rhys in the first place was because of the unexpectedness of it, and the fact that Rhys was and still is so raw to the concept of actual murder.

But it’s on a whole new level, an entirely different field, to board a train and slaughter anyone who doesn’t agree with Jack’s way of things, to mindlessly and personally rip apart families because they don’t – they just don’t understand, Jack could have taught them, he could have told them the same things he told Rhys about saving Pandora and making it better for everyone.

But he didn’t.

He murdered them. All of them.

They’d been going to a place called Sanctuary. A place Jack had mentioned in passing before, a hole of bandits cowering like rats. 

But Rhys doesn’t think it’s like that.

He’s been paying more attention to the paperwork he’s doing. Been paying more attention to where Jack’s resources go.

It makes his stomach twist into knots. 

\--

Rhys has his phone out, pacing in their apartment. He’s been calling Vaughn for the past fifteen minutes and Vaughn doesn’t pick up any of the times he tries, which, so far, has been a whopping eleven. Rhys’ heart is pounding in his chest and all the way up to his ears, and he’s afraid that if Vaughn even does answer his calls he won’t have the breath or the courage in him to tell him he can’t do this, he can’t keep doing this. That he’s panicking and he’s never panicked this way before.

Rhys panics again, looking himself in the mirror of the bathroom. 

When he looks at his own reflection, he wants to rip his own cybernetics out with his bare hands. 

He’s made up his mind, as much as a panicked person could.

So he leaves, his thought process going completely one-way, and that way was off Helios, off the constriction of Jack’s hands metaphorically wrapped around his throat. He just needed a break. To clear his head. To get Jack out of his mind, he needed… he needed a permanent break. 

That’s what he needs.

That’s what he’s needed for a long, long time.

Vaughn doesn’t answer, so Rhys gives up. He’s gotten increasingly selfish as time passed, as he absorbed more of Hyperion’s filth, and if Vaughn doesn’t want to come with him, well… fine. Fine, that’s fine.

He has to stop himself from crying as he walks down the halls as calmly as he can, because he doesn’t want to make a scene.

God knows he’s already looked at enough. 

\--

Rhys can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a curse that he has an entire map of Helios built into the back of his eye. But right now, it’s a blessing. He knows how to get to the moonshots, and now that nobody else is here because this part of Helios is pretty much off limits, he’s walking fast, and panicking himself even more, so, well, that’s probably not a good thing, but he’s too distracted to notice. 

He turns the corner abnormally fast and skids to a stop as he rams face-first into someone else. He’s pretty sure he hears his nose crack but that doesn’t matter too much, he’s panicking and that’s… that’s a guard and he’d just knocked him around and now all of the rest of the ones guarding the area are staring him down like they want to flay him alive. Nobody’s saying anything, though. It’s completely silent. Until he moves.

Rhys backs up one step, then another, and then books it in the opposite direction. 

\--

The first morning that Rhys isn’t on Helios, Jack knows immediately. As soon as he wakes up, he tries to connect to Rhys’ head (with the intention of laying out plans for the day, not necessarily radio sex, but if it happens to be initiated while one of them happens to be jerking off, well, he’s not complaining), and it takes longer than usual. It takes more than a split second, then it’s taking a few seconds, and Jack lays there in his bed with his mind flashing through every possible scenario.

He’s dead. Maybe his roommate jumped him and ripped out his cybernetics, maybe his spine, too. He had his eye torn out, or maybe a group of Hyperion employees fed up with one or both of them knew the program well enough that they knew Rhys was fair game once Jack was asleep and couldn’t see who did it. But wouldn’t he have activated the radio if something happened? He would have had time even if he only realized what was happening for a moment.

Unless he’d… Done it himself.

Jack lingers on that too long. He’s been working him to the bone, and knows he hasn’t looked too good lately. Hell, he doesn’t know if he’s seen him _eat_ in the last couple weeks.

He stops trying to connect. He wouldn’t have done that, that’d be stupid. He’s probably just asleep and accidentally disabled it or something. That can probably happen, right?

\--

He knocks twice on Rhys’ apartment door before he knocks more, and after about three seconds, his impatience takes over completely and he simply shoots the lock off.

The other occupant is halfway to the door, in boxers and a bathrobe, and once he sees the gun still in Jack’s hand, he looks like he might faint. 

Jack pockets it again. He laughs nervously.

“Hey there. Where is he?”

The guy in the bathrobe just looks confused, and a little scared, though Jack’s so used to seeing that second one that he barely noticed anymore.

“This _is_ Rhys’ apartment, right? You’re his roomie?”

The guy nods.

“Sooo,” he stretches it out, looking around the apartment as much as possible and not seeing him. “Where is he? Where’s Rhys?”

He still doesn't say anything, though he opens his mouth like he might.

Jack sighs.

“It’s ‘Vaughn’, right?”

Vaughn nods.

“Just tell me where he is, and I’ll go, and call someone to fix your door. On me, sorry.” He laughs again, and brushes his hair out of his face.

Vaughn’s mouth closes, then his throat moves as he swallows nervously, then he opens his mouth again, and still says nothing.

Jack makes a loud ‘ugh’ before he raises his voice the rest of the way.

“Do you _know_ where he is or _not_?”

Vaughn actually steps back a little in fear, and finally does something that doesn’t make him look like the world’s buffest fish; he shakes his head ‘no’.

Jack doesn’t waste any more time there after that; he slams the apartment door behind him even though it just bounces back open, and starts calling in to security.

The first person he calls, the head of security on the West half of Helios, lies and says he doesn’t know anything about his personal assistant, Rhys.

While Jack heads to _his_ office to strangle _him_ , he calls the East head of security, and when he lies too, Jack starts with the threats. It only takes having his ECHO calculate how long it’ll take to strangle the West Head and walk to the East security office before he talks, but even then, it’s all vague. Something about trying to restrain Rhys, he’d gone crazy or something and he should probably just watch the security footage.

He watches it from the West office while his hands settle around the Head’s throat, and the news breaks for himself around the same time as the Head’s windpipe.

\--

They have him by his right arm, two of them, and a third is going for the rest of him. It feels like he’s watching it slowly, frame by frame as Rhys’ other arm shoots out to hit the button, and then… 

The door closes.

It cuts the third security guard nearly in half, and takes off Rhys’ right arm completely. He can barely see him through the camera and through the thick windows in the moonshot canister, but his mouth his stretched wide on what’s probably a scream. He falls to the ground out of sight, but Jack catches another glimpse of him through the window when he uses his feet to scoot himself away from the top half of the guard sealed in there with him.

The guards holding his arm drop it once they realize what’s just happened, and only stare at it oozing blood on the ground for a moment before the lights start going off; the feed is silent, but he can still hear in his head the blaring horn that accompanies them. One stays onscreen to try to pry the door open, and the other runs out of view, most likely to try and kill it from a panel in the room. 

And that… that’s it. 

\--

Oh, God, he can’t feel anything.

\--

Rhys crawls out of the carrier with his left hand placed firmly over his opposite shoulder. There’s nothing there; just slick, wet warmth spreading over his hand and down his arm and the entire side of his body. The rest of him is numb and it takes a tremendous effort just to keep his eyes open. 

Too much effort. 

He falls face-first onto the sand, and doesn’t get back up.


	15. In the Devil's Territory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i never intended for this story to get so popular and i'm sorry if what i'm writing is disappointing for anyone, i'm always worried about not being perfect. the whole story is very personal for me and i've been writing it to cope with a lot of things that have gone on in my life and if this isn't what you wanted out of the fic, i really apologize, but this is for me and this is me trying to move on from bad things in my life, and snow's been helping me along with the process. your feedback has given me a lot of inspiration and it makes me feel loved and makes me happy that my writing is good enough for people to stick around for almost (so far) 40,000 words to basically read me vent about certain things and have a good time expressing myself, and it means a lot, it's amazing. i'm trying to practice before starting one of my own novels (i'm still in high school so it's very tough to start????? ahhh???), and you've all made this worth so much more than practice to me. also, there's gonna be a lot of new characters coming in soon. i hope i can write them well, i've been replaying all the borderlands games so i can get them right! 
> 
> that said, i really do hope you like where it goes.

It’s so nice, being numb.

So nice that he doesn’t want to come out of it, and doesn’t think he ever will. He’s fine with that, though. He’d be fine with just about everything short of waking up. It’s nice to not have to worry about the constant buzzing in his head, the force of remembering everything he scanned out of people, the people themselves.

Overall, dying is a pretty wonderful thing. He’d never thought about it before, never wanted to die.

He doesn’t realize he’s blinking awake until he’s face-to-face with white-ish bed sheets, until he notices he’s on his side and he feels far lighter than usual but he feels alive, for the most part, and up until that point he hadn’t noticed how much he actually _did_ want to live. Just to see what happened to him. It’s all a mess, he remembers that much, but the rest of it he’s not so sure. He’s still not sure if he’s dreaming or not, actually, so he tries to move.

“Don’t do that,” hisses a voice just behind his view, “I’m trying to salvage what’s left of you. So unless you feel like ruining it, and, seriously, be my guest, we’re running low on supplies as it is and I don’t think it’s a good idea to waste it on you, but here we are… don’t move.”

“What… do you mean, left of me?” He tries saying calmly, and it ends up coming out as a shaky whisper. His mouth is really dry, he hadn’t noticed that before. He feels like he hasn’t had a drink of water in days. He’s too tired to be nervous or needy, though, so he just lets the person talk. It’s easier to ground himself with a human voice anyway. He wants to go back to sleep, but he also really, really doesn’t.

“I don’t know, but you came out of that cannon with your arm just mysteriously _gone_ , stumbling around and shit, face planting onto the sand, and I don’t like it. You look important, and I don’t like it, but since we’re assuming that you tried escaping and someone here knows who you are, I’m saving your life. Alright? Stop moving.”

He notices now that he can barely see through his ECHOeye, like it’s in some kind of power saving mode. The rest of what he can see is tinted in a dark blue but when he tries, he can’t scan anything, though that might just be because he’s exhausted. He’d noticed that happening on Helios, too. Every so often it’d flicker out, but now it’s constant.

Rhys closes his eyes, focusing more on his surroundings than thinking about the weird biology of his tech. He doesn’t move, or tries not to, while he figuratively feels around. He’s already established that he’s tired, scared, and thirsty, but he’s also missing something kind of important.

Whoever is touching him now is putting pressure on his shoulder where he shouldn’t feel pressure, because there’s supposed to be all kinds of flesh and bones and stuff in the way. But this time there’s nothing stopping them from wiring things around it.

Rhys shivers, and he can practically feel the glare he’s receiving for not following directions.

They work in silence for a while, before piping up again.

“Who are you?” They ask.

“I’m uh, I’m Rhys.” He splutters it out, like he’s not sure he’s supposed to be giving out his real name, but since they’re evidently saving his life, he kind of owes it to them. “I’m Handsome Jack’s assistant.”

“What do you mean, _are_? You sure aren’t anymore, I can tell you that much. How the hell did you end up here, then? He got sick of you?” The person snorts. “I wouldn’t doubt it. Guy’s a monster, replaces his whole workforce in a year like they’re tissue cells.”

“I think… I think _I_ got sick of _him_.”

“Welcome to the club, Rhys.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“No.”

“Where am I?” He says anyway, not in the least bit discouraged.

“If you promise you’re not gonna call down Hyperion to slaughter us all for insubordination, sure, pal. But since I’m not sure what you’re going to do once I fix up your arm, I’m not telling you anything.”

“My tech doesn’t work, I couldn’t do that.”

“Oh, so you’d do it if you could, huh, Hyperion? Figures.”

“No! That’s not what I meant, what the hell! I just – I’d like to know where I _am_ and why I’m sitting here with my arm chopped off and someone I’ve never met in my life yelling at me!” 

“You’re on an old Hyperion drop site, bozo. Hyperion dumps stuff here every once in a while that they don’t want. They dump trash here.”

They’re silent for a few seconds, letting what they said sink into Rhys.

Rhys grimaces. That’s not funny.

“But we make the best of trash,” they continue, “broken loaders, _really_ broken loaders, misused tech, barely functioning vending machines, hell, we even ate the top half of the guy that came with you.”

“What?” Rhys whines.

“I’m kidding. We used to work for Hyperion, but when we fled we figured that nobody is going to check here, like, ever, considering it’s a wasteland of tech, and so far we’ve been right. If you screw this up for all of us I’m gonna make sure you wish I let you die on the sand. Anyway, welcome to Hyperion’s wanted list. Hope you enjoy your stay. You look kind of stupid and weak, so you probably won’t last long, but still. Enjoy it.”

“… What are you doing to my arm?” He derails it, because that’s all he thinks he knows how to do.

“You mean lack of. I’m covering up the gaping hole in your shoulder where an arm should fit with a temporary replacement plate. This is the first time I’ve done this for an arm. I’ve done it on legs, skulls, a couple eyes, but you’re my first arm. I see they managed that ECHOeye crap, took them long enough. But it’s kind of useless now, huh?”

Rhys can hear the grin in their voice, the satisfaction behind it.

“You used to work in the same division,” Rhys asks without asking.

“Yeah, I did. I didn’t approve of the test subjects given to us and I didn’t approve of a lot of things. So now, I’m here. Welcome to Pandora, Rhys. It’s a hell of a ride.”

Rhys relaxes on the cot, thinking over a couple of things.

“How long have I been out?”

“About, uh, let’s see… a few days? Max? It hasn’t been that long, but you’ve been _out_ , I figured you’d die before we got the chance to fix you, but you didn’t. You’re weirdly resilient. But you can’t grow back limbs, that’s the part that sucks. Though, this is a really clean cut. You try waving to your friends while the door closed or something?”

“More like tried closing the door while a bunch of guards attached themselves to my arm. Is that what happened?”

“I don’t know, you were there, not me. I’m almost done here for now, and then you can get up. You’re resilient but not resilient enough to where you’ll go much longer if you don’t eat, so we need to fix that. If you throw it up, though, you’re eating it again. We don’t have that much.”

“What’s your name?” Rhys asks quietly, like he’s afraid of doing so. Considering the last time he asked someone their name they’d ended up dead, yeah, he’s pretty nervous.

“Maria,” they say simply. “I’d shake hands, but you don’t have one.”

Rhys growls.

“Okay, bad joke. Usually that helps people deal with the process, but if it doesn’t work for you, that’s fine. No worries. I’ll save the arm jokes for later when you’re ready. Just let me know.”

Rhys pouts, and he knows they can’t see him, but he can’t deny the fact that none of that is funny, and he’s tired. He’s never felt grouchier, and he’s still buzzing.

“I’m done for right now. You gonna be okay to stand up, or are you going to fall all over me?”

Rhys shrugs as best he can, and then makes his way into a sitting position. The whole room sways and he almost falls back down again but he manages, barely, to keep himself upright. He looks down at himself and realizes that his shirt is gone.

“Oh, yeah. We had to rip that off. Hope you don’t mind.”

He turns his eyes toward the source of the voice, Maria, and blinks. She’s tiny compared to him, somewhere in the lower five-foot range, with short brown hair that looks like it’s been chopped unevenly with something definitely not made to chop hair. Her glasses are crooked and she looks nothing like a Hyperion scientist, but since she is, Rhys doesn’t make a comment. Also, she has a bandage over one of her eyes.

“They let the one-eyed wonder mess with my arm?” He asks himself, out loud, and she glares.

“Considering you’re missing more than I am, I’d stay quiet. And if you can’t take arm jokes, don’t make fun of my eye.” She says it snappily enough that Rhys recoils. “The bathroom is over there, you can clean the blood and gunk off your face and then come out. And Rhys?”

He turns back to look at her again after glancing around the room made of all sorts of things, from metal to wood to rocks to… everything in between. At least the bed’s made out of mattress. “Yeah?”

“If you wanna live out here, I’d suggest not being such a smartass to anyone who helps you.”

“Right,” he mutters, and then turns to the bathroom as fast as he can go without making it look like he’s hurrying. When he does make it to the bathroom there’s a cracked mirror, which doesn’t help that much but it helps enough, and a sink. The water works, which surprises him, but it barely comes out. They obviously don’t have a lot to go around, so he saves it and looks at his face. He’s got a bloody nose, so he wipes that off, and a few scratches here and there from the drop. But his arm is just… gone. It’s hard to look at, but there’s all sorts of wires and metal sticking out of where it should be now.

It looks terrible, but at least there’s no open wound. It doesn’t look as terrible as he feels, so whatever, it could be worse. At least it didn’t… take off his lower half.

He thinks about the events that led up to this, and feels a little woozy from standing up. He definitely remembers the panic that set in, the need to get away, the actual succeeding in getting away, and the guards grasping at him in the moonshot.

If they’d managed to pull him out, he’d probably be dead.

But they didn’t. And he’d been the reason that one of their corpses was lying somewhere in the desert inside of a cannon. They’d never find that.

For some reason, it doesn’t feel like it matters that much.

That disgusts him, the fact that he thinks that, but it also doesn’t, in a way.

He heads out of the bathroom and out of the room they’d had him in, obviously built to look like a medical station. There’s dried blood on the sheets he’d been lying in but he doesn’t know how much of it is his, since they’ve probably had other people through there.

Gross.

Outside he’s met with what he thinks is a camp sheltered by some kind of cliff in the desert, and there are a few people moving around, doing all sorts of things. There can’t be more than fifteen or so of them altogether, but they all look pretty… content? Being here? They don’t look that miserable, even though they’re just sitting in the desert like ducks in some kind of makeshift camp. It's sturdy enough, though, so he's not going to complain any more than he has to. 

Rhys fidgets uncomfortably by the doorway to the place he’d been in, and immediately goes to twine his fingers together out of nervousness. He’s stopped by the fact that he has nothing on his right to touch with, and he stares down at his remaining hand with a tight sigh.

A water bottle is tossed hard at his stomach and he yelps, staring at it dumbly when it falls to the ground in front of him. Like he wasn’t expecting that. Because he _wasn’t_.

“Don’t drink it too fast,” Maria yells, and Rhys bends down to pick it up.

“Thanks,” he says bitterly to himself, and slides down against the wall. It takes him a while to get the bottle open with one hand, and by the time he does manage to get it open he’s frustrated beyond belief. It’s worth it, though, because holy crap water is so good and he missed it so much –

He gets it all over himself. That’s not embarrassing at all.

Luckily, nobody is watching, so he goes on to watch them instead. There’s someone else he thinks he recognizes, or recognized once, who’s currently pacing around what looks like the remains of a loader bot too far away for him to call out, but the feeling passes when the awful, barely-there static in his head persists.

He doesn’t remember when that started, actually... at least for a few months since he started scanning people. It started building up the more he scanned and the more he took in, and he doesn’t know how to clear his system. Either way, it hurts, it's disorienting, and it’s unbelievably distracting. 

And it makes him forget things.


	16. Disconnected

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hi everyone. sorry for taking so long, i got really nervous about writing for a while and started hating my writing and all that stuff etc etc blah blah blah self-loathing. i hope i can pick it back up. thanks for being patient, love you all!

He hasn’t had a breakdown yet, which is good, all things considering. For the most part he just feels like everything is wrong – like he’s dreaming but doesn’t know it, and he woke up that morning into another dream and this is just the final step of the dream sequence, he’ll wake up drenched with sweat and tears in his eyes but he’ll still have both arms and he’ll still be on Helios.

But as the sun sets around the camp he’s in and he’s still there by the time the sun really goes down over the horizon, still sitting in the same spot he’d sat mindlessly for hours, he gets nervous. Nervous about a lot of things, but mostly about Jack. He doesn’t want to go back, doesn’t think he ever does, but mostly because he was afraid of getting himself beaten up by a bunch of Hyperion douchebags for ever trying to escape the haven up in the sky. One of those douchebags being Jack, of course.

Jack wouldn’t kill him. He knew that more than anything, that Jack wouldn’t kill him, and that scared him the most. Because he knew Jack was capable of plenty of things, but not to what extent he was capable of. He’d seen a lot in his time on Helios, pretended a majority of it had never happened – but it did, and his point of denying it is long gone in the wind. 

Jack might think he’s dead. 

Or he might not.

Either way, he’d left a parting gift up on the station, half a man and a good chunk of himself to boot. Whatever Jack thought was up to him, but no matter what outcome Jack came to the fact that Rhys had run was an undeniable part of the whole thing. 

Rhys takes his thoughts away from Jack to keep the creeping paranoia at bay, leaning back against the wall behind him and flexing his left hand. He isn’t in pain; there’s nothing to feel, and Rhys lays his fingers gently over the plate at his shoulder. He lets them rest there for a while, pulling his knees up to his chest, because somehow that’s comforting. Rhys knows it’ll hit him at one point, that he’s not whole anymore and everything has come crashing down around him; all his immunity up in Hyperion, his entire life (though not a very full one), everything is changing faster than he can handle, and eventually he’s going to hit a wall from going so fast.

And that’s not going to be a good thing.

He’s sick of feeling empty and without identity – he’d been ‘Handsome Jack’s Personal Assistant’ for longer than he could remember, which was a bad sign to start with considering he hadn’t been his assistant for all that long in the first place, he’d missed people, spent less time with his friends, lost friends altogether with the sudden cut off of contact, friends whose names he can’t remember and are memories at the back of his head that he can’t seem to access, he’d substituted everything with Jack and nothing but Jack. 

He wants to miss what he had, but he doesn’t remember what it was. Remembering shouldn’t be so hard. And that static filling up his head is only making it all worse, and he feels like he’s going to bite the fingers off the next person who comes near him like some kind of rabid dog. It’s not a good feeling, but he’s wound up. 

But falling asleep against the wall is easier than he’d thought it would be.

\--  
Someone’s touching his head.

“Hey,” comes the whispered voice through the noise, and Rhys opens his eyes. Half of what he sees is tinted a dark blue, and the other half can barely see in the first place. It’s too dark. “You up yet? You’re missing dinner if you don’t get up; I’m not keeping it warm for you any longer than I have to.”

Rhys lifts up his head. It’s the one who patched up his arm, Maria, and she has a bowl of something he’s never seen before in her hands. 

“What is that?” He says, albeit grouchily – he couldn’t have been out for more than an hour or two at most, and now he just feels worse. And sore. He stretches his legs out a little bit, and his knees hurt like hell, but he’s able to move enough to the point she sees him fit enough to have a bowl of something hot dropped into his lap. 

“Don’t ask what it is,” she says flatly, “just eat it.” 

There’s a fork that feels like it’s made of plastic in the bowl, which is definitely too heavy to be made of plastic, and he looks down at it, rubbing at his eyes with his hand. 

He doesn’t say thank you, and that looks like it sets her off, but he’s not really paying much attention. He’s more fascinated by the food in front of him and the idea of food in general, because he can’t remember the last time he really sat down and ate. 

It tastes like cheap meat, something that’s probably mutated to hell and – even more likely - lived on Pandora and was also rabid and covered in dirt. He couldn’t picture himself ever hunting; he knew what some of the things on Pandora looked like. 

In theory. He’d never been here except now. 

When he stops eating long enough to finally look upwards, he notices the campfire that’s built up a few hundred feet from him. There’s a good amount of people sitting there, all eating from the same bowls, and if he could really hear anything apart from that angry buzzing, he’d be able to hear a bit of laughter every once in a while from the people sitting in the sand. 

He’s too busy watching the fire, mesmerized by it for whatever reason. He never saw that much actual fire on Helios, there was no reason to burn anything out in the open unless it was over a stove and it wasn’t like he could just take a camping trip onto the east end and look at the stars – 

Okay, he could do that part, but he couldn’t make a fire. Anyway, he’s too busy watching the fire to notice when someone ends up crouching beside him, doesn’t notice until careful fingers brush his hand and he hears a voice that should be familiar say his name. 

Rhys jumps away from the touch, gasping loud enough that some of the people at the fire turn their heads. 

“Whoa, hey, Rhys, it’s me.” 

He looks at her, wide-eyed, his heart suddenly racing like she’d just taken a stab at him. 

“I- I don’t know who you are.” 

“What? Rhys, it’s me. Yvette. I was your _friend_ , up until you got yourself wound up in that stupid promotion. Remember me?”

“…Wh…what?” 

He can see enough in the dark, and he feels like he should have lied and pretended to go along with it, because she looks shattered.

She was the one he recognized earlier that day – or, yesterday, depending on what time it is, but he can’t grasp what he’s trying to remember. 

“Come on.” She says, clearly trying to hide something in her voice, and she stands up, holding a hand out to Rhys. 

He doesn’t know what else to do, so he takes her hand and tries pulling himself up with her help. It feels wrong, standing up, but there’s not much else he can do, he’s already standing, but it does make him want to throw up. Not as much as being face-to-face with someone he should remember does, though. 

“I don’t know what he did to you and frankly I don’t want to, Rhys. Vaughn told me you were offered a promotion and you took it the day of, I knew you would, we all knew about your obsession, but really, Rhys? You abandoned me. And the only reason you didn’t abandon Vaughn was because you _lived_ with him. I haven’t heard from you since then, you know that? I haven’t even _seen_ you. You went off the map.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Rhys mutters, letting her drag him along. She’s not forceful and she doesn’t sound forceful, just exasperated and tired. 

“I know you didn’t. From what Vaughn told me he was working you to death, I know you wouldn’t do any of that on purpose, not back then. Vaughn didn’t want to leave you – “

“What?”

“Vaughn didn’t want to leave you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Rhys, you’re the only one of us who never realized what your idol could do and what he _did_ do. The only reason Vaughn didn’t leave was because you were there.”

“I left him.” 

Rhys takes his hand from her and Yvette stops walking, and he runs his hand through his hair, grabbing a fist full of it like that’ll help anything whatsoever, pulling a little. 

“You also left your arm behind, Rhys. I don’t think it would have been smart for you to drag him into one of your escape plans, considering what it cost you. You’re not good at those. He’ll be fine. I can promise that, okay?” 

“I don’t even _know_ you! How am I supposed to trust _you_?”

That’s when she grabs his hand by the wrist, takes it away from his hair.

And then smacks the back of his head.

“Ow, what was that for?!”

She does it again, and the static breaks.

“The first one… for…”

He can’t hear her, because he’s too busy staring blankly at her face.

“Yvette – Yvette, hey, wait wait wait, hold on, punch me in the face.”

“ - Rhys?”

“Punch me. C’mon. Please.”

“Why?”

“I think I can – just – look, if you don’t punch me, I’ll punch myself and it won’t work because I only have one hand and I don’t – “ he balls up his fist, and then sighs shakily, “ – I can’t, y’know, do that, just do me a solid okay, I think I can remember if you just p -“

She nails him in the side of his face, the side where his port is, and Rhys stumbles back. 

“Ugh,” he groans, rubbing at his jaw. 

“Rhys?” She says tentatively, like she hadn’t just hit him in the face with a punch he had no idea she was capable of.

He’s actually never been so glad to hear a familiar voice in his life. Or to have been punched. Both are good.

“Your glasses are broken,” he says quietly, and when her mouth opens as if to say something, Rhys surges forward instead. It’s an awkward angle, his arm doing all it can to do the work of two, but he manages.

“I – I don’t know why I can’t remember things,” he says, and he can feel his words and his body trembling, “I think my tech is overloaded, I don’t… I don’t know how to clear it up, they never taught me, there’s so much in my head, Yvette? Yvette, I’m sorry, I never meant to leave you or – “

Yvette squeezes his waist and that’s when he can feel tears start to well up in his eyes and he can feel how hot her face is where it’s pressed against his chest, like she’s about to cry too, and Rhys just holds her tighter. 

“I’m such a douchebag,” Rhys whines into her hair, taking in as much of her as he can like he’s afraid that the second they stop touching he’ll forget everything about her. Everything that’s flooding back to him, memories of her and Vaughn and himself at a table eating and laughing and _living_ together, how important he was to her and how isolated he’d let himself become so fast just to let himself be some kind of plaything because of that stupid promotion, that stupid job, it was hardly a secretary job and Rhys couldn’t kid himself anymore. 

“No, you’re a work in progress, Rhys. We’re all a mess out here, you’re no different. But we can fix that, okay? You’re not the only one here. You’re not the only one.” 

And for the first time, Pandora feels better than Helios. 

It feels like he can _breathe_.


	17. See No Evil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ahh wow, almost 700 kudos. i'm gonna cry, it's so scary but exciting to know that many people like my fic for some reason. thank you so much everyone ;;
> 
> sorry, it's a short one! we'll get some longer ones coming up soon.

So, about that breakdown? Yep, it’s happening. 

He doesn’t stop crying for hours. Even when he’s out of tears to cry and his eyes are sore his breath is still lurching and Yvette is still sitting beside him, still comforting him just by being there despite all he’s done, or felt like he’s done. Still crying even after Yvette gets him a jacket to wear with one of the sleeves cut off, something that’s even too big on _him_ , with the Hyperion logo nearly scrubbed off the front. It feels like a brand.

He cries because he’s afraid that he’ll have to keep hitting himself to keep the static from coming back, to keep remembering Yvette and all the times they laughed together and ate lunch or watched a movie; he cries because he misses home and he misses Vaughn and wants to pull him from Helios and hug him so hard he can’t breathe; he cries because all these feelings he’s repressed for months are flooding back into him just like he thought they would the moment Yvette helped him clear his head.

His brain is done letting him forget things, and he doesn’t want to remember ever again. He wants to go back to forgetting, to being that unfeeling asshole back on Helios that people sway away from in the halls because they’re too scared to initiate contact. To swallowing up negativity from everyone around him to the point it’s practically dripping from his mouth. 

At least back then everything was easy.

\--  
“Hey, Yvette?”

“Huh?”

“Can I talk to you about something?”

Yvette looks at him for a moment before getting on her knees beside him on the ground. That’s her way of saying she’s ready to talk, or listen, and she nods carefully.

“When I was on Helios and I had all this done,” he motions to the left side of his face, “I didn’t remember any of it. I think Jack knew that, I think I remember him knowing that, that I wouldn’t remember. That… doesn’t really make any sense, but I can remember it now. It’s coming back in waves, and it kind of – it kind of hurts.” He hears his voice crack and clears his throat. 

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“No. Hey, Yvette? When did you get here?”

“A few months ago. There were about thirty of us when we first came down here, a few of them moved on, some of them went looking for Sanctuary. Have you heard about it?”

“Yeah. A lot of stuff about bandits. I guess you’re one of those now, huh? I mean, to Jack.”

“So are you, Rhys.”

He almost says he’s sorry she had to come down here alone, but holds himself back. He can’t say he’s sorry, sorry won’t fix that. Sorry can’t fix anything. 

He doesn’t want to think of himself as a bandit. He hadn’t stolen anything from Jack except, well, himself, and that… huh. 

\--  
Eventually he stops crying because he can feel, and starts crying because he can’t. 

Every day is harder than the last, and they don’t make him help around the camp but he tries doing it anyway because he feels like being here is his hell and he needs to make up for trusting Jack with his life and his love by helping others. He’s never been a physically strong person and probably never will be but he makes an effort just as much as everyone else does, and by the time he gets to the point his arm is too sore to move and he’s got blisters covering his palm he doesn’t feel any better. 

The breakdown lasts a while. Even when he feels normal he knows he’s not and knows it’ll only last half a day at most before he gets paranoid again, before reflexively trying to use his right arm finally gets to him. And it always gets to him.

After a few days, Yvette can’t take it anymore. She sees how much it’s eating him up, trying to learn how to balance, work, or do just about anything with one hand. He’s not built for it, he doesn’t think anyone ever is but especially not him, and Yvette’s mostly sick of finding him staring at the floor on the verge of tears, tucked away in some corner away from everyone else because he hates when people see him like that. Yvette’s more sick of it than anyone. She doesn’t know what it’s like, of course she doesn’t, but she knows how much it gets to Rhys, and that’s enough for her to decide something needs to be done about it.

She doesn’t tell him what the loader parts are for when she takes them into the med wing, doesn’t tell him until she convinces Maria that it’s a good investment to help Rhys out.

That takes a while. Maria hadn’t stressed how little they had and Rhys had been forced to see it for himself, as much work as he was doing he felt like he was getting skinnier every few minutes because there wasn't enough food to go around. Helios had really pampered him, all things considering.

\--  
“You don’t have to do this, Yvette.” Rhys says when she first brings it up to him. His throat is raw and the skin under his eyes is dark despite the fact that they let him sleep for a majority of the day half the time. It’s probably because he’s sleeping to stay away from reality. That’s not a good thing.

Yvette waves him off.  
\--

Maria’s assembling the arm piece by piece, connecting each part to him from the shoulder and down and then melding them together. Yvette’s on his left side, holding his hand. Mostly because every time she moves something it makes his shoulder throb, and that’s not fun at all. He hates it. She knows now that anything medical related is a sore spot for him, even if it is only what he’s hinted at vaguely, and her presence helps. 

Her company doesn’t stop his irritability, though.

“Ow! Would you stop jerking me around like that?”

“That’s what he said.”

Yvette grins, tightening her hold on Rhys’ hand. Rhys can tell she’s trying to hold back a laugh and trying to hold _him_ back from commenting too, but the second part doesn’t work. 

“Ew, gross – one, no, and two, _no_ , why am I letting you do this again?”

“So that when I throw things at you, you can actually catch them.” 

Rhys thinks that would be pretty optimal, even if that’s not even close to the reason why they’re doing this for him. They just want him to stop being so depressed around their camp, probably. Considering she’s made a habit of throwing things at him that he can’t catch, it’s a pretty good incentive to have a new arm, though. Even if she hasn’t explained how he’s going to be able to control it, if he even is. Or it’ll just be limply hanging there all the time. Honestly, at this point he’s not going to turn even that down, he mostly just misses the weight of it at his side. She’s still assembling it and it already feels right.

He zones out for a while, lets her work. It’s nice that they’re doing this for him, he doesn’t feel like he deserves it, but it’s nice. She’s putting genuine care into what she’s doing despite her talk, connecting wires slowly and gently, enough so that he can tell Yvette warned her about how he’d be. 

Rhys turns a little red from embarrassment just thinking about it.

The moment he moves, he snaps back into reality. He doesn’t know how she’s going to set up a connection until she starts moving from his right to his left toward his port and that’s when he freaks, letting go of Yvette’s hand and arching away from both of them as much as he can without moving, because part of him is still rational enough to know that’s a bad idea, right now these are the only people on his side. Though, another part of him is still freaking out. 

“No, no no no – no, don’t charge that! I don’t want it back on!”

“Relax, I’m just booting your tech up enough to establish a link between your shiny new arm and your brain. It’s local. I know how this works; if you’re worried about your freaky eye-scanner coming on again for long, don’t, I’m pretty sure I can pull this off.”

“Don’t – don’t tell me to relax. What, you mean you’re _pretty_ sure?”

“I’m sure enough to know that if I don’t do this right there’ll be loaders on us in ten seconds flat, and I’m sure enough to know I’m not willing to take that big of a risk for you unless the chances are pretty damn low. Like, low low. Extremely low. So low – “

Rhys cuts her off bitterly. “I get it. Fine.” 

Rhys sits still long enough for her to come near him, reflexively moves again but not too far that she can’t jam whatever she made to jam into his head. It’s a little misshapen and he can _feel_ that, but he doesn’t have time to question it because his eye is flickering back on. He covers it for some reason, like he’s ashamed of it, and because it’s suddenly warm again in his skull. 

It’s on long enough to send out a pulse.

Rhys laughs nervously, still covering his eye. “Okay, hah, take it out. Please.”

“No, we’ve gotta wait until your arm lights up. Give it a second.” 

Rhys starts making this continuous, nervous whine like that’ll help his case, his whole body tensing up and jaw clenching enough that it’s going to hurt later, too. Overall, he’s an anxious mess, and both of them are just staring at him. 

The noise stutters out when he sees lights flash in the corner of his right eye, and he shuts both of them when Maria reaches out to pull the plug out of his head. It hurts even more to pull it out than it was to put it in. He doesn't want to think about it any longer than he has to. 

When he goes to reflexively run his right hand through his hair out of nervous habit his right arm whirs to life, and since he doesn’t completely know how to work it and isn’t expecting the movement he gets a smack to the face with metal that almost sends him reeling. It’s not hard enough to leave a bruise but he definitely feels it, and no one laughs. 

Except for Rhys.

It’s almost hysterical for a second there - completely hysterical, genuine laughter. He laughs so hard that tears swell at the corners of his eyes, and even as his eye turns back off, leaving the world in a slowly-becoming-familiar shade of dark blue, he still laughs. When he gets a chance to look at Yvette she seems worried until they make eye contact for longer than a second, at which point she realizes that for the first time in a few months he feels like he’s sincerely allowed to be happy and... and in the end she smiles back at him.


	18. Nice?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nice.

It takes a while to get used to the thing, and Rhys isn’t gonna lie and say it’s easy. Or comfortable. Yeah, there’s a comfortable _weight_ that mostly balances him out at his side, but it feels foreign and broken. The joints are difficult to move and it makes all kinds of freaky noises whenever he bends it a certain way… but at least whenever he wakes up he can stretch and lace his fingers together over his head the way he used to whenever he got up. 

But still, it’s funky. Sometimes he accidentally hits himself with it like before, it’s just slightly heavier than his old arm used to be when he still had it, and he can feel the difference in his shoulder, too. It’s not heavy enough that he feels like it’ll fall off or something, _that_ would scare him, but no, it’s mostly a positive. 

Once he’s done getting used to it, which takes a while, it’s great. Yvette helps him out with something he can only call physical therapy, except it works his brain more than it does anything else. The arm isn’t connected to his muscles, it responds to commands through his brain, and working out how to do that effectively is tiring. They’ll sit together for hours under the shade of the cliffs behind them while Rhys moves his fingers the way Yvette tells him to, and when he manages to flex his arm and curl the metallic fingers into a fist at the same time, her genuine grin is worth losing it in the first place, he thinks.

Seeing her happy makes him feel like he’s making it up to her, somehow. Like everything is sliding into place and they’d be perfect again once Vaughn made it out to them – the perfect trio he hadn’t even remembered was a thing until a few weeks ago. He remembers all of it now, though. Or, as much as he can at the moment. 

He’ll find himself remembering things about Yvette, about Vaughn, or about both of them, and he’ll catch himself smiling at the memory, even if it’s something stupid and vague, things that every group of friends does. And he immediately goes to Yvette to explain in as full detail as he can manage, and she listens. 

Things are going great, all things considered.

The only thing that really bothers him isn’t his arm, though. It’s the random quaking of the ground that Yvette’s used to but Rhys always finds jarring, so much so that he reflexively grabs her arm and holds onto her until the shaking beneath his feet stops. Yvette has to explain that it’s Jack’s drills, mining into Pandora.

Rhys vaguely remembers thinking about something like that, a lifetime ago. Mining stuff. He remembers, yeah.

The last time he’d thought about Eridium was when he’d asked himself what Jack could possibly be using all that stuff for. Nobody seems to know where all the raw stuff goes, either. It’s just… there.

It gives Rhys a bad feeling in his gut.

\--  
Jack runs his fingers through his hair, issuing a heavy sigh as he sits back in his chair, feet resting on his desk. He’s tense as hell, muscles in knots and jaw seemingly permanently clenched, and if his mask wasn’t in the way, he’d have dark bags under his eyes.

He looks like _shit_ , and he knows it. The employees know it, and he’d be busy at work busting them back into shape if he felt like it. He just _didn’t_. 

Apathy’s a killer.

He’d blamed it on the scientists first, because his first thought had been that they were responsible for Rhys getting some kind of virus worming through his tech and that made him go nuts, and after snapping a few necks he just… got bored. The original team that’d worked on Rhys and that section of design for implants was pretty much wiped out, aside for two. One of them was missing, had been missing since before they implanted that crap into Rhys in the first place. The other one he’d left alive just to screw with.

Jack had taken them out one by one, left the one guy there so he’d be pissing his pants for months while Jack focused on things that actually mattered, but he had a note somewhere about him. To remind him in case he forgot. Anyway, when he finally thought he was in the clear, Jack was gonna come after him. It would’ve been hilarious.

At least, that was the original plan. 

Until he got tired of that, too. 

He cracks his knuckles when he moves to sit up, working through emails with a scowl. 

The room is empty, and it’s too quiet. It’d been too quiet for weeks, and that got to him, as much as he hated to think about it. He hadn’t even bothered getting a new assistant to fill in; that felt… wrong. Useless in the long run. The whole reason he’d gotten Rhys in the first place was because he was sick of going around and looking for new ones by going through the whole official process of it. And he’s not getting a replacement. He’s not about that. Besides, Rhys is alive. He’s got a feeling about it.

His gut’s never wrong.

\--

“Rhys, I want you to meet someone.” 

“I already know everyone at the camp, Yvette.”

“No, you don’t. Just the humans.”

“I – what? What are you talking about? You have pets or something on Pandora? There’s no way I wouldn’t know about that for weeks. You can’t keep something like that a secret for that long.”

“I wouldn’t call him a pet,” Yvette says vaguely.

\-- 

He’s in the middle of working when it happens. He always keeps it running in the background, the application that showed him Rhys’ vitals up on Helios. 

The application is always running, but there’s never any feedback from the kid’s end. He’s as good as dead to the thing. All of his vitals disappeared off the map once he got down there, been turned off since Rhys had esc – left Helios… or, well, his body had. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Which meant that he was dead, if anyone else was concerned.

Luckily, Jack isn’t like anyone else. And it pays off, too.

He’s in the middle of working when the screen changes to show that application in full view, a few excited blips flashing across the heart rate portion, some brain activity. It’s long enough for him to stand up so fast and so sudden that he knocks his chair over with the motion. 

The lines representing blood pumping through his heart go flat, but Jack stares at the screen long after it goes quiet and motionless, waiting for something else. Anything else.

Eventually, after finding himself hypnotized for much longer than he should have been, he snaps out of it, blinking in the silence of his office and straightening out his coat. 

He feels his breath speeding up as he backs away from his desk, tries to keep it from getting too excited before he can really assess the situation. That was too long to have been a glitch, too many heartbeats. Real heartbeats. He doesn’t have the tech with him to trace the source of those few blips, but man, is he _gonna_ by the end of the week if it kills him. Or somebody else. 

When he walks out of his office to get what he needs, the first people to see him notice the difference in everything about him immediately, just from entering the hallway. The predator-like _stalk_ , the hungry and purposeful look in his eyes, the very shift in the room that announces his presence. All there. 

It feels _good_.

\--

“Whoa, Yvette. You have a _Loader Bot_? And I didn’t _know_ about this?”

He stands in front of the robot, looking up at it with his jaw slack in awe. He hadn’t ever had to come extremely close to one before, but he knew well enough what they were capable of. 

“Hi.” The robot says simply. 

“Yvette, how come he’s not killing me?”

Yvette shrugs. “I mean, he was dumped here on purpose, who knows how long he was down here just… hanging out before we came along. He’s a little different from other Loaders, he doesn’t kill everything that moves. We’re friends.”

“Friends?” Rhys laughs.

“Your arm was made from the corpses of my siblings.” The robot says suddenly, in his… awkwardly dry voice. 

Rhys looks down at the palm of his robotic hand, and then back at the Loader.

“I’m… sorry?” Rhys says nervously, rubbing at the back of his neck with his human hand. He looks to Yvette for help, but gets none. She seems intent to let them work it out, standing with her arms crossed. “I didn’t hurt them or anything, they were just lying around. I was missing an arm, it was Yvette’s idea.”

“Why?”

“I, uh, ran from Helios. Got my arm chopped off getting away, y’know, haha, just like that.” He makes a slicing motion with his left hand. 

The Loader just stares at him. Or, he thinks he’s staring at him. It’s kind of hard to tell, but either way it’s putting him off. After a long moment of the scariest, most nerve-wracking silence he’s ever experienced the robot moves, placing both of his… hands… on Rhys’ shoulders. Rhys jumps, but otherwise he stands motionless and doesn’t try to move away from the robot. 

Rhys figures if the bot wanted him dead, it would’ve happened a minute ago. One solid robot punch to the gut and it’d all be over for Rhys, probably. 

“Initiating friendship.”

Huh.

Rhys grins. “Thanks, buddy. Me too?”

“That would be optimal, human. Friendship requires at least two parties.”

\--

So, Loader Bot is cool. Good conversationalist.

And he thought about what he said, for a while. The corpse thing. That was an interesting way to put it – creepy, especially coming from a robot, but interesting. And the more he thinks about it, the weirder it sounds. Like, he’s part robot now. Part of him used to be part of sorta-living loaders that were all dropped down onto Pandora because it was easier to assemble a new Loader from scratch than fix what was wrong with them in the first place.

Rhys can empathize. 

He wonders if Jack has a new assistant, actually. 

He’s embarrassed at how much that hurts him to think about. Someone just replacing him and… repeating the process, with Jack. The whole process. Except maybe the replacement would be _just_ ruthless enough to shoot someone, and they’d be Jack’s new favorite. 

He misses the contact. Part of him thinks he’d take Jack’s fingers brushing his elbows to move them into a better shooting stance over being alone like he too often feels like he is, even with Yvette there.

But that’s not a nice part of him.

It makes him feel a little down, like he’s got this sort of kinship thing going on with all these robots now and this Loader Bot that he’s apparently friends with is just kind of living in a graveyard for his friends. Rhys hopes that’s never him. And so he talks about it with Loader Bot, who’s pretty enthusiastic about it, actually. Well, as enthusiastic as he can be for a robot. A decent amount of enthusiastic. 

Not in the sense that he’s enthusiastic about losing things like friends or siblings as he put it, just that nobody’s talked to him about it before, or showed so much interest in talking to him in the first place. Rhys can tell he’s been here for a while. It’s almost like talking to another person, except the other person doesn’t have the same vernacular, or anything close to it. Loader Bot’s straightforward and simple; he’s easy to talk to. And he’s literal. That’s usually a plus. 

But sometimes he’s crueler than Yvette is. Far more. He’s taking a break from talking to him for a while, actually, because Loader Bot questions him about Jack, and that’s a pretty sensitive subject that robots just don’t… understand. Mostly because he’s internalized all this guilt that he _shouldn’t_ be internalizing, but can’t help it. 

So he’s with Yvette. Being around her calms him down, and she doesn’t ask him about his relationship with Jack, and she’s a close friend. All good things, all what he needs right now. 

Maria told him in passing that Yvette had needed him too. They just needed each other, simple as that. So they’re walking shoulder to shoulder just outside the camp.

Rhys thinks he hears something, though.

He stares up at the sky, squinting in the light. Almost immediately he figures out what he’s looking at, and he pulls at Yvette’s arm a little, not breaking eye contact with whatever the thing in the sky is.

They both stand completely still as a moonshot flies overhead, soaring just over the horizon.

Rhys stares at it the longest, and he’s still staring at the horizon line when he speaks.

“Hey, hey - what if that’s Vaughn? Yvette, what if it’s _Vaughn_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a note from Snow: this chapter makes SW old enough to buy cigarettes and/or pornography. congrats coyotes!!!


	19. And I Can Bleed and Hide and Still Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took forever and a day, a lot has been going on and i'm working on like 12 other fics, it's a big ol mess.

“Rhys, slow down!”

“I can’t – we have to go see if it’s Vaughn. I mean, what if he’s worse off than I was? He’s, like, _outrageously_ buff but he’s also, I don’t know, two feet tall and what if he’s missing a leg or, uh, his glasses?”

“His glasses?”

“My _point_ is he’d be helpless either way. With an arm gone I could still pull myself out of the cannon, if he’s missing a leg he won’t be able to do anything. Not even dramatically pass out on the sand like I think I did when I came here, just… sit there in the cannon and die. I don’t like that.”

“Why are you obsessing over the leg bit?”

“I don’t know!”

“Look, Rhys. We can’t just go charging off into the desert after a moonshot that has to be at least a couple of miles away. We have to think about this; not everyone is lucky enough to land right on our doorstep and we’re not prepared for long trips. We’ve seen bandits before, and skags, and all kinds of things you wouldn’t believe. Just relax for a minute.”

Rhys paces back and forth a few times, exhaling heavily through his nose before stilling himself.

“You good?” Yvette asks.

“No, but I won’t say anything,” Rhys replies grumpily, crossing his arms.

“I just have a bad feeling about this, okay, Rhys?”

“I don’t.”

“Because you’re you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

"Nothing, Rhys. Just leave it alone for now."

"I can go," Rhys says bitterly, holding back the outburst he might've had at the implication she'd made of him lacking the proper alarms that should sound off in his head when something seemed off. He already _knew_ it took him a while to figure out awful things about situations. 

He doesn't need a fresh reminder. 

"Wait, what? Rhys, if he's hurt, you can't drag him miles back. If someone else is in there they could be even bigger, it's impossible for _anyone_ in the camp, and that goes for you, too."

"I..." he looks around, searching for something to help him out. He gets a glimpse of Loader Bot out of the corner of his eye, standing beside him, and he jumps. "Oh! I can take Loader Bot, right? He could help. I'd be fine."

Everyone in the camp watches Yvette for an answer, like she's their supreme ruler or something. Rhys eventually turns his eyes to her, too, utilizing all his knowledge of begging through facial expressions and silence to make it work. 

Eventually she caves. Mostly, Rhys thinks, because she wants Vaughn back too, or at the very least someone else to save. They all need that, even if their supplies couldn't handle it. Something about morale. 

"Alright, Rhys. I'll get Loader Bot prepped and you can go when _all_ of us are ready for you to go."

\--

Yvette's beyond hesitant to let this plan go through into action. Deep down, Rhys knows this could go horribly, horribly wrong, he knows that separating himself from the group couldn't possibly be the best way to go about this - but if there is someone in the moonshot, they're not going to be waiting around for someone to save them before bleeding out and dying. That's just not how it works.  
They’re a bunch of sitting ducks trying to help some other sitting ducks, and overall, the whole thing is a mess.

And then there's the part of him that wants to play the hero. He hadn't recognized how much he craved the idea of being _good_ in the sense that he would be defying everything he'd been taught up on that space station, which he’d now come to realize was vile - stick it to the man, or something. 

The part that wants to save the day is a lot more vocal than the anxious one at the back of his head telling him to hold onto Yvette and never let go, never move from the one place in the universe he truly felt at ease about most things. 

Inner conflict is a funny thing. 

Yvette tells him what to watch out for, what corners to avoid and how to avoid them, hands him water and a few basic medical supplies in case they're... necessary, and tells him to be careful. Rhys knows he wouldn't be able to use what she gave him if the time ever came, he wouldn't be able to stomach it, probably, but he nods his head surely anyway. Maybe he'll surprise himself. If it's Vaughn, it might be a different case. He thinks he could try and save Vaughn if he had to.

When he sets off, he's momentarily scared that it _is_ Vaughn. 

The last thing he wants is to watch his best friend, one of them at least, bleed out on the metal floor of a moonshot. 

And die. 

When he's a safe distance away and can't feel the whole camp watching his back from behind him, he tears up a little, enough to leave faint tracks across his cheeks through the dust and dirt that's settled there. It's nothing dramatic, he doesn't feel better or worse afterwards, it just sort of happens and then goes away just as quick, like it never happened. 

He looks at Loader Bot, who's walking next to him. Slow, mercifully. 

"Hey, Loader Bot? We're friends, right?"

The robot moves his fingers into a thumbs up, but says nothing else.

And somehow… somehow, that's comforting. 

\--

About halfway through the walk, Rhys finally understands Yvette's hesitance completely. It trips up his steps in the sand enough to send him reeling but not quite to the point of losing balance enough to fall - Loader Bot would have caught him anyway, so that part isn't too concerning, but...

It's the thought of what might happen when he finds the crate. What might be in it. 

He knows, logically, it can't be Jack. Jack wouldn't send himself down in a moonshot so he could pop out like some child's toy with confetti and balloons and a banner splayed across the back of the crate that says "welcome home, Rhysie", he wouldn't send himself, least of all in a non-aggressive approach to the whole ordeal, so the likelihood of him seeing Jack, _ever_ seeing Jack felt... slim.  
He’s not sure how that makes him feel. 

But while he walks, he dwells on that. What would he do if Jack found him? Would he - would he care, still? Or would he murder Rhys with the same pistol he'd tried to get him to use on someone else? Even after all this time he felt that Jack wouldn't kill him - that thought might be the byproduct of his separation from reality during his time on Helios, a byproduct of the idea that he meant more to Jack than he really did and still means just as much - but simply killing the ones that screwed him over didn't seem very... Jack-esque. He puts something extra into it. 

Rhys doesn't even know if he matters that much to him. 

Rhys turns his head to watch Helios as it floats through space just beyond the sky, and even though it isn't directly facing him, he feels like the Eye is glaring straight at him. Like it can see him, all the way from up there. 

If he ever went back to that ship, he'd never come down again. 

He needs to stop thinking about it and let it go, but he knows there's no way to do that unless he wipes his memory, which he can't really do reasonably. Every time someone around the camp mentions something horrible about Jack his initial, knee-jerk reaction is to open his mouth and defend him, tell everyone that Jack was good to _him_ and that has to count for something, it has to, but it doesn't, and he closes his mouth before anything stupid can fall out, and ends up feeling worse. 

He kind of wants to get away from where they've holed him up. He loves Yvette, she's like a sister to him, and he's grown to like everyone else but that's the only thing keeping him there, and he has no idea where these thoughts are coming from and he knows the more he ventures and the more he pushes the more he'll find out about his boss that he won't like. Over half of him is certain that might be helpful for him, to distance himself from the idea that Jack can be good, that Jack is thoughtful and genuine and cares about people, especially Rhys, but the other part of him is sure he'll break if he finds out too much. Feel too guilty for things that aren't his fault.

Rhys clutches at the sweatshirt he's wearing and notices, for the first time, how hot it is here. He's not used to drastic weather changes, not in the slightest. Didn't have that on Helios. He feels kind of nauseous. 

"Hey, Loader Bot, can't you fly or something?"

"No. I am not functioning with my full capabilities."

"Oh. Alright then. What _can_ you do?"

"Walk."

Okay, then. 

Actually, he doesn't know if that's an answer or a command. Either way, Rhys keeps walking. 

By the time they make it to the hill the moonshot landed over, Rhys feels like he's suffocating. And dying. But mostly suffocating. Same thing. When he got back he'd have to pick out something else to wear - a hoodie is fine under the cliff the camp is settled under and when he's not in the sun elsewhere, but jeez, he didn't know what hot _was_ until today. 

He forgets all about that, though, every thought wiped clean away from his brain when he catches the glint of the moonshot's casing in the light, and he goes tearing down the hill before he can really take a moment to think about it, heart pounding in his chest. 

And, well. 

The door's already open when he gets there. 

And there... there's nothing in it. 

"What?" He hears himself say, breathless, distant, exhausted, and disappointed. 

And hopeless. 

And then he's sticking his head in, eyes searching every part of the crate as he can manage with the angle, which is just about every bit. There's no blood, not a single drop, there's no body, no ripped clothes, no nothing - no _nothing_ , and he steps back from the moonshot only to pace around to its side and kick the living shit out of it with one shoe. 

It hurts him more than it does the crate, and he sucks in a breath to keep himself from losing it altogether. After a minute of heavy breathing, borderline breakdown, he lets his shoulders slump, and calms down as much as he can. It's a lot for him, it's a whole fucking lot but he manages well enough to keep himself just steady enough not to blow a fuse somewhere. 

He catches himself drifting back to the thought of Jack when he actually says the word 'fuck' under his breath, and that only frustrates him more. 

"Not right now," he mutters as he tracks a line in the dirt with the back and forth of his movements, the pacing, "not right now," and he puts his flesh hand to his forehead like that's going to stop the flurry of memories, "we're going back, Loader Bot."

Rhys climbs back up the hill, which takes far longer than he'd originally thought, and he's panting by the time he makes it to the top.  
As he’s taking a minute to breathe and pour some of the leftover water on his head, the sky… vibrates, for lack of a better explanation. Rhys looks up, water dripping from a few strands of his hair, and watches the moonshot fly through the sky – it looks, for a second, like it’s coming straight for him, until it slows down and lands, heavily, less than a mile from where their camp is. 

Rhys just stares, eyes wide and fingers shaking where he holds the water bottle. He’s still collected enough that this is all going right by his head, that he’s not entirely convinced this is happening.

“Loader Bot? How fast can… we…” he stops short as another moonshot comes down, then another, all in quick succession. It’s not a random drop – they’re surrounding the place, deliberately, they’re surrounding the camp with moonshots -

“No, no, no, this isn’t happening, this – “ Rhys starts to move in the direction of the camp and down the slope, about to start running when the robot grabs him by the back of his hoodie and holds him there. 

“Let go of me!”

“No. I have instructions.”

“What? From _who_?”

Loader Bot doesn’t respond; he just holds him in place while Rhys twists violently in the sand in an effort to get him to let him go. 

Eventually, he connects the dots. 

Yvette had bad feelings. 

Yvette had talked to Loader Bot beforehand. 

Yvette knew something was wrong, something had happened, somehow Hyperion had found out about their hideout and that doesn’t explain the one that’d landed over here but all of it adds up to one thing, one thing he _can_ process.

“It was Yvette, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Another moonshot lands just short of crashing into where he knows the camp is. 

Rhys panics. 

“Alright, I get it, I get it! You can let go of me now!”

Loader Bot lets go of him.

Rhys stands still for a moment, brushing himself off. 

And then promptly darts in the direction of the camp.

There’s a sudden tug on the hood of his sweatshirt and Rhys chokes, losing his balance on the dirt and struggling to keep himself from getting strangled to death by the hood hiking up against his throat. 

"You're... you're choking me, Loader Bot -"

The robot doesn’t let him go this time, just holds him there while he scrambles for a rock to hold onto so he’s not getting lifted so high in the air but he can’t find anything and he hears them coming, he hears the moonshots tumbling out onto the desert one after another – he can’t see them, his eyes are rolling back into his head but he knows that this is bad – that’s the only thought that can get through his head, this is awful, awful, awful, and everything is coming undone _again_ , he… just…

“Loader Bot…” 

“I have been instructed to prevent you from returning home if something were to happen while we were gone. Something is happening.”

“I…”

Loader Bot finally loosens his grip, letting Rhys fall to the ground like dead weight. Rhys sucks in a deep breath, turning sideways on the dirt to inhale desperately.

Rhys curls up where he’s lying, coughing pitifully, probably sucking in dust with each breath. 

He doesn’t notice he’s being picked up until he feels cold metal digging into his gut, until he’s situated limply over Loader Bot’s shoulder. 

“Where to, boss?” The robot says, as if there’s not currently something terrible going on down the hill that Rhys still can’t see because his eyes are spotted black and his vision is blurry at best, like nothing’s wrong, like nothing matters more than following orders. Rhys points half-heartedly at the way they’d came like that would somehow change the robot’s mind about going back, like that’d get him to get rid of the orders Yvette had probably set into him. 

“We gotta go back, Loader Bot. We gotta… Yvette’s back there, she – I should be back there, what if it’s Jack and if he finds me he’ll let them go, Loader Bot – “

“Stop.” 

“Okay.” Rhys takes a deep breath, as deep as he can, and keeps himself from having a meltdown in the present. He can feel it bottling up, knows the second he has no direction and nothing to do or think about he’ll have to face his feelings then, face everything that’s happening right this second and acknowledge the fact that it feels like he’s never going to see his friends again and he wants to go back to Helios but Loader Bot won’t let him try and, shit, he takes his flesh hand and slams it down on the back of the robot as hard as he can.

Loader Bot doesn’t say anything, he just stands there and waits for direction. 

Rhys struggles internally with finding something that could fix this. 

“Sanctuary.” He eventually says, dully. “I don’t know where it is, but there’s Sanctuary.”


	20. Cellophane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings for non-consensual choking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1,000 kudos... wow??? that's amazing and i'm just. haha wow, i never thought we'd get all the way here and it means the world to me that so many people have enjoyed and continue to enjoy a story written by myself and another person i've come to love more than anything else in the whole world, that so many people have wanted to stick around to read what we've written together. 
> 
> a lot has happened over the course of this story - i've come across so many wonderful people in this fandom in the comments who are, genuinely, some of the kindest people i've ever talked with or read comments from, i finished the hardest year of school for me by far, i've gotten so many opportunities with school and life experience that'll shape the rest of my life, played borderlands a lot - and you've all been a part of it... i know that sounds really dumb, but you all mean a lot to me. i know i'm scared to interact with you all sometimes because i don't know how to express a lot of things, but you all help me a lot! you've helped me with my writing, my story-building, my self-esteem, you cared about me when i had to take a break, and some of you have been here with me for months since day one and supporting me through everything else, too. 
> 
> right now, i want to dedicate a lot of this to snow. i love you so much and i wouldn't be here without you. 
> 
> anyway, all that said, the story is far from over.
> 
> i hope you all continue to enjoy where it goes. it's been one hell of a ride. 
> 
> \- coyotes

“It’s okay, just pull the trigger, look,” Jack puts his finger over Rhys’ but doesn’t push, “just tighten up your finger and it’ll go, it’s not that hard, sweetheart, you can do it.”

“I can do it, just – just give me a second,” Rhys mutters, taking half a step back to press himself flush against Jack’s chest. He can feel Jack pressing forward just as much as Rhys is pushing back, his breath on his neck – warm and stuttering, probably with excitement, feels his chest rise and fall where it’s up against his back. 

Rhys has never killed anyone before, and every time he’d thought of it, he hadn’t envisioned it like this. He’d hear the guy sobbing on the tile floor of Jack’s office if he wasn’t so focused on Jack’s breathing, labored and tight and far more than ready for Rhys to pull the trigger beneath both of their fingers. 

“Do it,” Jack growls, and Rhys clenches up. “And don’t close your eyes.” He adds as an afterthought. 

Rhys pushes down on the trigger, hears Jack’s breathing pause and suck inwards, and realizes he’s doing it too. They’re both holding their breath, just slightly, and when the flash of a gunshot fills the room, everything slows down.

He never sees the bullet enter the guy’s head, only the spray of blood that comes out the other side, the trickle of fluid sliding down the entry wound. The way thousands of drops land and drip along the glass behind Jack’s desk, the body dropping lifelessly onto the floor while more blood pools around his head, so much darker than every other splatter.

Rhys’ whole body shivers, and Jack grins against his neck. 

“That’s my boy,” he says softly as he takes the gun from Rhys’ hands, steps back just far enough to let it fall quietly onto the desk, and then goes back to Rhys, back to being impossibly close. Rhys’ heart thumps hard in his chest, harder than it ever has, and it makes every part of him warm – his fingers are twitching, almost shaking but not quite there, and when Jack reaches down his pants to pull his shirt out of his pants, Rhys laughs breathlessly.

Jack hums in question, and Rhys just shakes his head. 

“That was… that was exciting,” Rhys says, following it with a breathless laugh, and Jack nods without saying anything, presses kisses to Rhys’ neck as one hand travels up Rhys’ shirt, up to his chest and back down again, rough and needy. In any other situation he wouldn’t call Jack needy but he thinks this is the time it could apply the most, Jack’s pressing down on his skin hard enough to push him around a little, and Rhys has to fight to keep his balance. 

Rhys looks down at his own hands, watches the way they can’t keep still and how one of them is covered in metal, botched and rusting and covered in scratches. There’s something wrong here, but for a while he can’t pin it down, can’t seem to grasp why none of this feels right.

Well, it feels right, right in the sense that Jack’s touching him and that’s nice, he can’t remember why he’s felt so lonely recently but this is helping, even if he is grabbing him a little too hard. 

This feels like it’s happened before.

“This isn’t how it went,” Rhys suddenly blurts out, trying to move away, but Jack’s got one arm around his waist and the other hand against his hip, and Rhys doesn’t feel in control of his body – like he’s trying to swim through syrup and it’s getting him nowhere. 

Jack doesn’t seem to hear him, and if he does he doesn’t say anything, just bites almost-gently down on his neck without any sort of prompting or warning.

Rhys moans before he can help it, and Jack definitely hears that – Rhys can feel him smiling around the bite, the way Jack’s fingers tighten possessively. 

“Look at _you_ , Hyperion’s newest killer,” Jack murmurs, kneading into his neck with his teeth and his mouth until Rhys is pretty sure he’ll bruise – well, he thinks he’s covered in them already, so it hardly matters. 

There’s a spot of panic in him, somewhere, smothered by twenty different layers of something else. It’s there, he knows it’s there, but he can’t –

Jack turns them around to face Jack’s desk, turns Rhys until he’s facing Jack, the backs of his thighs bumping against the desk. 

“Jack, I didn’t - ” Rhys hears himself say, so distant it’s barely a whisper, “I didn’t kill anyone –“

Jack tilts his eyes back up to Rhys’ face, glaring him down until Rhys’ words slide to a stop. Jack, satisfied with the silence, moves his hands to wander over Rhys again, fingers brushing through his hair for a moment or two before one of Jack’s hands is pushing him down onto the desk until his back’s flush against it. 

“Jack – “ Rhys whines, trying to bring himself back up, but Jack’s hand holds him steady.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Jack says, moving Rhys’ legs apart so he can stand between them, leaning forward over Rhys, expecting and waiting for some kind of answer. 

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Yeah, and I’m made of diamonds,” Jack rolls his eyes, putting one hand at the side of his face to get him to look at him, “kiddo, hey,” he pats his cheek a little, “Rhys. Rhysie, look at me, _there_ we go. You were into this a second ago, what, you change your mind?”

“No, I just, I feel like this has happened before, like this is different, I – “

“Shh, you’ll get used to it.” 

Rhys wants to say that that’s not what he meant, it has nothing to do with the killing, but one of Jack’s hands moves to his neck, putting just enough pressure on it for Rhys to feel his breathing slow. 

“What are you doing?”

Jack just shushes him again, takes the other hand and closes that around his throat, too. 

There’s a brief span of time where nothing happens and Jack doesn’t move. Rhys can’t – he can’t push himself back up even if he tried, the position won’t let him get anywhere, and at first he’s not all that scared, but – but then Jack puts more and more pressure on his windpipe, cutting off his breath before Rhys has a chance to suck any air in, and Rhys can’t help but panic. 

He doesn’t want to waste what he has in his lungs but he manages to get out a “Jack, you’re choking me – “but Jack doesn’t seem to notice, or if he does he doesn’t care, just keeps on pressing down, until the edges of Rhys’ vision are going dark and his feet are scrabbling on the floor to try and get some kind of leverage. He’d put his hands around Jack’s wrists, try and pull him off, but he’s not in control of them, moving them is so difficult it feels like he’s dreaming, it –

He’s dreaming. He’s _dreaming_. 

Rhys jolts, blinking his eyes open rapidly only to be met with pitch black darkness. He still feels like he’s suffocating so he rolls sideways until he’s on his back and it clicks that he’d been pushing his face into the crook of his elbow while he slept and… he’d been suffocating himself. He breathes in as deep as he thinks he ever has, lies back against the sand. 

There’s enough light from the stars for him to see the outline of Loader Bot on the other side of the sad excuse for a fire Rhys had managed a few hours ago, and somehow that makes him feel better. Rhys rubs at his eyes with his left hand before looking down at his feet, frowning down at the lines in the sand where he thinks he’s been kicking. 

Loader Bot’s not watching him – or at least, he doesn’t think so, but he’s not really sure what else he’d be looking at. There’s not much around. 

“Anything happen while I was out?” Rhys ventures, once he can speak. 

“No.”

Rhys sighs. “You know, you’re really great at conversation sometimes, you know that?”

“Thanks.”

Rhys moves to sit into an upright position, heart slowing down from how hard it’d been pounding just a few minutes ago. He lifts his left hand to check over his neck – it doesn’t feel like there’s anything wrong and there’s a definite lack of bruises, so that’s… good. 

Rhys sits on the sand, hugging his knees to his chest, until the sun comes up. Rhys’ eyes are still sore from crying and he’s never been so dehydrated in his life, but he can manage a few days without water, can’t he? They’d find someone who could help, or… or something. With all the crap going wrong, something has to go right. Maybe. 

Rhys has no idea where they’re going, either. They’re lost, Rhys is tired, he’s hungry, he’s thirsty, and he’s _hot_ , and he misses his friends. Vaughn and Yvette could figure this out, they could find the right way to go, and Rhys… Rhys could follow them, that’s what he’d do. And everything would be okay. 

Well. Things weren’t okay. 

\--

They walk a ways down through the Dust, Rhys trudging along in Loader Bot’s shadow. It doesn’t make it any less hot or any less hard, but he likes to pretend it does, because that’s all he’s really got going for him. 

“Hold on, LB, I have to… ugh.” Rhys turns and lands himself face-up on the sand when they find some real, genuine shade behind a rock, breathes in the slightly cooler air around him. “We’re never finding anything, are we?”

“I can keep looking ahead,” Loader Bot offers, but Rhys shakes his head. 

“Don’t wanna split us up,” Rhys says, his voice hoarse and tired.

“Are you okay?”

“Define ‘okay’, LB. Because, honestly? Yvette’s gone off who knows where, if she’s even still alive, Vaughn’s probably gone forever, I’m stuck in the middle of the desert with a robot that doesn’t have a GPS or any functioning weapons systems, and if I have to run from one more of those giant rabid _ant-things_ , I’m going to drop _dead_. It can eat me, for all I care.“

After that, a long silence stretches between them. Rhys just wants to sleep, honestly. He’s aching from walking and talking and moving and being alive, and all of this sucks. The people in Sanctuary probably wouldn’t even take them in, if he’s being honest with himself, and he’s not sure whether that makes it comforting that they hadn’t made it, or makes it just… sad. He should’ve stayed on Helios, should’ve… should’ve done what Jack said. 

No, he shouldn’t have. He shouldn’t have gotten wrapped up in some stupid idol-worshipping bullcrap, he… ugh.

This sucks. Everything sucks.

\--

Rhys doesn’t know when he passed out, but judging by the fact that he’s still shaded by the rock, it couldn’t have been too long. 

Something’s kicking the bottom of his shoe. That’s what wakes him up. 

“Hey, you alright?”

That voice sounds familiar. Like… Jack, but strained a little higher. Rhys opens his eyes, sees just the silhouette of someone standing over him, so he pushes himself into a sitting position with his arms. 

“What’d you say?”

“I was asking if you were alright. You don’t look that great.” The silhouette holds out a hand to him, and Rhys hesitates a moment before taking it. They haul him up and Rhys sways on his feet like he’s about to fall over, but he manages – just barely – not to do that.

Rhys finally gets a good look at the guy, and… there’s a scar on his face, stretching the expanse of both sides, crossing over one of his eyes and down to his cheek. Rhys has seen that before. He’s seen it before, when he first got his cybernetics and he could scan Jack’s face and everything is falling back into place and Jack’s in front of him and he wants to call for Loader Bot but Rhys can’t find it in himself to say anything, let alone scream. 

Rhys backs up, as far as he can get away from him, until he’s pressed up against the rock he’d been using for shade.

“Get away from me,” he says pitifully, like that’ll somehow help, and Jack holds his hands up to act like he’s not going to hurt him. 

Jack looks down at his shirt, the faded Hyperion logo on it, then back up to his face. 

“You’re ex-Hyperion, huh? Me too. Look, I – I’m not who you think I am, I promise. I can help you. I just wanna help.” 

Rhys grimaces. He’s probably just dreaming again, that has to be it, he -

“You want this?” Jack asks, moving one of his hands behind his back slow enough that Rhys doesn’t feel the need to tense up so much, takes out a water bottle and holds it out to him.

Rhys would drool if he had it in him.

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“Sure you do. Take it, it’s fine. See?” He unscrews the cap, puts his lips against the top and swallows some, like he’s proving it’s not poison. 

“Now I definitely don’t want it.”

Jack pulls a face that Rhys has never seen Jack make before, somewhere between exasperation and a desperate want to help. He thinks that’s the moment he realized it couldn’t possibly be Jack, and that… confuses him, more than it helps. 

Rhys reluctantly holds out his left hand. Jack gives him the bottle, and Rhys has to use all his self-restraint not to drown himself in it. He slides against the back of the rock eventually, sitting down, and Jack follows him, squatting down enough that they’re about eye level.

“Who are you?” Rhys says hesitantly, quietly, like he’s afraid of hearing something… something he doesn’t want. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t want, he knows this isn’t Jack, it couldn’t possibly be Jack, but… none of this makes sense. 

“I’m Timothy Lawrence,” he says, starting cautiously, like he’s afraid someone else is listening. By the time he gets to his last name, his voice is much clearer, and he pronounces it like an act of defiance.


	21. Rhyspect

“I can fix him up for you; I used to do that stuff every once in a while on Helios. Adding GUN protocols to Loaders, make ‘em explode, all that kind of stuff. But I’m guessing you don’t, uh, want him to explode, haha,” Timothy says, rubbing the back of his neck as he walks.

Rhys is still looking at the ground, following Not-Jack’s footsteps in the sand. It’s hard to remember his name – his name’s Timothy, it shouldn’t be so hard – when he looks… like how he does, but he’s trying. Trying to stop associating him with Jack. 

But that’s impossible.

“Yeah. Please don’t.” 

“I won’t,” Timothy replies awkwardly, and they share a moment of silence. It’s got to be the worst silence Rhys has ever endured – they’re both thinking about how much he resembles Jack, that much is obvious, but it means different things to both of them. Entirely, completely different things. Rhys has no idea what it means for Timothy, but he knows that it makes his own gut tense, and it can’t be any better for this guy.

It’s odd, chancing a glance upward and finding Jack’s body moving in a different gait than _Jack_ , a less destructive and threatening stance and more… loose, not purposeful, not meant to make himself bigger than he already is. He’s wearing lighter clothes and less layers than Rhys is used to with Jack, but Rhys guesses the only reason for that is because he’s smart and they’re both in the middle of the desert. Still, it makes him seem friendlier, lighter, like he won’t snap his neck at the next available opportunity. 

Not that Jack would do that, either, but… well, it doesn’t hurt to feel like he’s safe. 

All of that put together doesn’t make him notably less paranoid, though. He wants to ask him all sorts of things but holds it back, only because he’s afraid of getting too excited about this, about anything. Everything’s gone wrong lately; he’s terrified of screwing up something else. 

\--

So, turns out, the guy lives in a cave. There are a few guns on one side, some pots and pans, an actual _bed_ , a fire pit, and it looks almost comfortable. Almost. Maybe in another lifetime where he spent most of his days outdoors, but that’s not how it is. He’d spent most of his life on a space station, up in… space. There _was_ no outdoors. 

He guesses he’ll have to suck it up the way he’s done everything else. 

He can’t walk any more by the time they make it to the place, and Timothy’s been reaching out to him for the last stretch of distance like he wants to help him along, but keeps stopping just short of getting an arm around him to haul him the rest of the way. He’s respecting him, and Rhys almost wishes he wouldn’t, and he’s not sure why. This is all really confusing, exhausting, like he’s entered some sort of alternate reality and doesn’t quite have his bearings yet.

It’s almost exactly like that, actually. Helios had been the only reality he’d known before landing on Pandora, and now he’s dealing with things as they come like some sheltered, spoiled child. 

Rhys staggers along until they get to a place he can sit down without feeling like he’s in immediate peril, somewhere off to one side of the cave. His legs are aching – no, wait, everything is – and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stand up again for a while, so he resigns and lies there on the ground like he’s made to be there. 

“You gonna be okay?” 

“Yeah,” Rhys says quietly, “just tired. I’m still not even sure this is real.” 

Timothy doesn’t say anything, and even if he does, Rhys doesn’t hear it. 

\--

Rhys wakes up somehow sorer than he’d been going in, grey and brown fabric folded by his head, boots, and… uh, the whole place smells like eggs – but in a good way. Cooking.

“It’s not Hyperion, thought you’d appreciate it,” he hears from the other side of the cave.

“What’s not Hyperion?”

“The clothes. They should fit you; we’re about the same size. I don’t know how you managed getting anywhere in those shoes,” Timothy laughs a little before cutting himself off, clearing his throat. 

“Where’s Loader Bot?” Rhys asks, sitting upright with a grunt, looking over the clothes next to him. 

“He’s outside. He’s a funny robot; I’m not used to them having their own personalities. Or, like, a sense of humor. You can change now, if you want, I’m, uh, busy. I hope you’re hungry.”

Rhys nods slowly even though he’s pretty sure Timothy is facing the other direction, works the hoodie over his head and replaces it with the new shirt.

New isn’t the right word, exactly, but it’s new to him. And a lot more comfortable. It looks like it’s been patched together with plenty of different shirts before it, but he’s not about to complain, it fits fine and so do the pants, once he gets them on. The boots are another story, only because they’re old enough that they manage to be a little big on him from use – he has no idea who they’d been used by, but he guesses that it doesn’t matter who used what, they’re his now until some bandit decides to loot his corpse and take his shoes from him. 

He stands up, wobbles a little with his arms out to balance, and then sets himself up straight. 

“You okay?” Timothy says, facing him now.

He’s been asking Rhys that a lot, like he’s worried or something. Rhys is torn between being uncomfortable at the hospitality and crying, for some reason – he ends up not feeling the need for either option, so he just shrugs. “Been walking a lot.” 

“Yeah, I could tell. You looked like you were about to die.”

“Still feel like it, actually.” 

“Here, this’ll help.” 

Rhys has been on Pandora long enough to know not to question the food he’s given by people who don’t have any real reason to poison him or anything, so he takes the fork and the bowl and starts eating.

They taste enough like the type of eggs he’s used to, so any chance of him questioning it disappears after that. He almost eats so fast he chokes on it, and he knows logically that if he eats too fast he’ll just throw it all back up, so he manages to keep it down and swallow and slow down, and that works well enough. 

Timothy moves to sit next to him – not immediately next to him, but close enough to keep a conversation without raising his voice higher than they both want to.

\--

_I used to be a Vault Hunter,_ he could say that. _I had student debt and needed a job,_ is more accurate, but considering what the ‘job’ ended up being…

“I was Jack’s first body double,” is what he decides to say. “Before the cloaking stuff was around, so.” He swipes his hand in front of his face, as a gesture to all of it. “Permanent.”

Rhys doesn’t say anything, so instead of shutting up, he tries to make him understand.

“I had a _lot_ of student loans,” he laughs, a miserable sound that has almost entirely replaced any genuine laughter he might have once had. “Thought that my degree would mean more if it came from some pretentious, way-too-expensive college. It didn’t.”

Rhys still doesn’t say anything.

“The voice modulator should run out in another twenty years or so,” he sighs.

Rhys… Laughs, actually. Just a little bit, and not in a particularly mean way, either, just… Appreciating the dryness of his voice when he says it, and how _miserable_ he sounds.

Tim laughs too, and that’s different enough from Jack’s laugh that it’s reassuring. Nervous, maybe sort of scared, maybe even purposely different to distance himself from the guy he’s modeled after.

“What’s your real voice sound like?” he asks quietly.

Tim laughs again, but this one’s a short bark that’s sudden and forceful enough to startle him.

“Higher,” he says. “Cracks,” he admits.

Rhys smiles the tiniest bit at that. Honesty and admitting imperfections are something he’d hardly ever heard from Jack either. Not in the same way as this.

“Imagine, like, the most cliche ‘movie nerd’ voice. Imagine a voice that goes to Chess Club and, like, wears really thick glasses. That’s my voice.”

Rhys’ smile turns into a grin.

“Oh, and freckles. Can’t forget the freckles. Still miss those.” 

This is coming… surprisingly easy, actually. He’s not used to having full conversations with people – not anymore, anyway.

“I know you’re not… _Him_ ,” Rhys finally says, playing with the shoelaces on one boot to avoid making eye contact at first. It actually sounds sort of choked up, and Tim wishes there was a way he could help without looking like Jack. “It’s just tough to see the face I came here to get away from, y’know?”

It feels like progress. 

\--

“You were his favorite, weren’t you? He mentioned you once, I think. I think I remember that. It’s hard to pin down exactly what really happened and what I made up in my head, sometimes.”

“I was his favorite because I was good at acting and he could look at me like I was a mirror, I was so good at being him that he just – too good, I guess.”

Rhys looks up at his face, and then opens his mouth. “How’d you – “

“He did it. With a brand.” 

Rhys closes his mouth, then sighs out an “oh.”

Neither of them knows what to say after that, and Rhys doesn’t want to push it too far.

Eventually, a light clicks on in his head. “He did this to me,” Rhys says breathily, pointing at his eye. “I… he knew I’d have to be conscious and didn’t tell me.” 

It’s Timothy’s turn to laugh, really laugh. Not bitter, not happy, just there. Hollow, in a way that it’s not really funny, it’s just a noise that lets them sympathize. “Guess we’re both in the same boat, then.” 

They look at each other, then, and grin. It doesn’t feel forced, or weird, just… different, they’re both connecting with each other in a way that neither of them have been able to for the longest time. Timothy knows they can’t ever really be friends, not in a close sense, the same way Rhys knows he’ll never be able to stop his heart from racing every time Timothy’s eyes turn up toward him and he sees Jack, but it’s… comforting, that they’re both not alone for now. 

Rhys thinks he understands, but he has to make sure.

“Why are you helping me?”

Timothy inhales, like he’s preparing to do something tiring, or repeat something he’s repeated thousands of times before. “I feel awful for what I did when I was with Jack and the others. They were all my good friends, but they weren’t good people, except for maybe two of them - and one of them wasn’t even a _person_ , and I worked for Jack for so long that eventually I just, gave up. Accepted the job, did everything I was told, all ‘yes sir’ and no backtalk, pretended to be Jack as long as I could take it. Jack’s done a lot more than brand my face, and considering you’re down here eating eggs with the guy who looks like Jack because of a surgery he never asked for and not up there, you probably already know that.”

That doesn’t really answer his question, but he nods anyway. 

“I can’t do anything about my face, not anymore. There might’ve been a time when I could’ve gotten it fixed – before we entered the vault and Jack came out looking like this – but that’s long gone, and I have to deal with it, and I have to deal with everything I did to those people. I feel like – I feel like I have to help people, make up for everything Jack does and everything I did, y’know? I know I can’t, like, go around showing my face to people all the time, I can’t help people distance me from the face, I’d never force anyone to do that, but… it’s hard. But I know I have to.”


	22. Deluge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pleas protect timothy lawrence
> 
>  
> 
> (short baby chapter like a filler until i finish college apps and also hi this is not dropped ilu all finally also I apologize for any format issues i may or may not have impulsively wrote this at 2am?)

Maybe, in another lifetime, this all would've gone differently. 

"I know we can't ever be friends."

This isn't the conversation he wanted today. 

Maybe, just maybe, in another lifetime, things would've sorted themselves out, organized themselves in a better way, and - and he'd be off doing something greater with his life, something that might really make a difference in the grand scheme of things. Maybe he'd be out with his friends, all at once, all of them off Helios and all of them together - maybe Vaughn would grow a beard or something, look like some rugged, gung-ho, gun-wielding...

...small person. 

Pff. Nah. 

He'd laugh at the idea of that in another place and another time, but right now really isn't it. 

Instead, he's sitting on a few jutted rocks with the man who spent years of his life pretending to be Jack, as the man who spent years of his life wishing he could do everything he could and be everything that he was, and that first man is rubbing the back of his neck with one hand (Rhys has gotten to the point of knowing, usually, exactly what he's going to say as soon as he does this, but this time he's caught off guard - and he hasn't even been here that long) and fidgeting with the other as he tells him,

"I know we can't ever be friends."

Rhys wants to ask why, like the idea of them never being friends surprises him, like these seven words all jumbled up together into a sentence don't make any sense to him and he doesn't fully understand the language, but he knows why. 

Timothy has been feeding him, been looking Loader Bot over and drawing up schematics and doing who-knows-what with them (Rhys knows what, he's leaned in beside Timothy while Timothy runs his fingers over lines and circles and wires and shows him how things are going to play out). Timothy's been doing everything in his power to make Rhys comfortable in the middle of the desert where everything, given the chance, would eat him. Probably even the people. 

Definitely even the people. 

But, for lack of better, more careful phrasing, Jack had fucked him. In every way, shape, and form, Jack had fucked him. Physically, mentally, Jack changed his life by fucking him over, fucking him over, uh, desks, and fucking up his entire head. All the trauma, all the bullshit in his mind that makes him just not want to get out of bed sometimes (not all times) is in some way associated with Jack, and that's just how it is. It's rough when your only companion is a complete look-alike and sound-alike to a guy like that. 

The scar's the part that makes his guts knot the most. A constant reminder, even more so than his arm or his eye, that Jack's always there. Jack did that himself, with his own hands and his own fire. You can feel it in the air. He can't really explain it in words. 

It's like Jack isn't even human, like he's something more, capable of things nobody else could even dream of doing. 

Both of them feel it. 

He won't tell Timothy this, but he's been keeping up with the subtle differences. Tim's more stocky, broad-shouldered. Sure, Jack kept himself busy enough to make sure he could strangle a man just as big as him and not have to struggle the whole time for control, but he doesn't run around the great Pandoran landscape for survival like Timothy does, not nearly as much. He likes to think that, if he really wanted to, Timothy could beat the shit out of Jack in a fistfight. So, that's comforting, just as comforting as the different pitch in his laugh, the gait that shows how careful and focused he is on stepping, other than just looking intimidating for other people to shy away from him; the way he holds his weight up when he carries things. Rhys has sort of made a game of it - coming up with things every day that make Timothy his own person and not Not-Jack. It's a nice way to pass the time when they spend so much of it together. 

Sometimes, though, he can see it. A flash of Jack he's tried so hard to get rid of, purge himself of. Rhys gets it. 

It's in both of them. 

So, this goes back to the conversation he's avoiding by wandering off into his thoughts. 

Friends. 

"I know," he hears himself say, repeating the first sliver of that phrase, but doesn't really believe he's the one saying it. 

But it's okay, he'll be off on his way soon. This is just a pitstop. He has stuff to do. Friends to save. 

For some reason, his chest hurts when he thinks that. 

\--

The same reason he knows why he and Timothy can't be friends, he knows why Timothy can't come with him to Sanctuary, when he finds it. 

It sucks. Going there would probably be good for him, being with people who... might not kill... him -

Okay, they'd hate him there. But his lack of socialization with people he isn't pretending to be Jack with is pretty apparent in some of his mannerisms. It's not that he struggles to be nice, or good, it's just that he's unpracticed with it, always tiptoeing around things to make sure he doesn't screw it all up and scare someone off. Rhys knows for a fact that if he had seen him coming and wasn't, in fact, dying from dehydration, he would've high-tailed it away from him out  
of blind panic until he dropped from, well, dehydration. Or starvation. 

Dehydration would get him first, probably. That makes sense. 

He kind of wishes Timothy would at least try and come, but he wouldn't make it anywhere near the place. That's already been established between them. 

\--

They're all outside, Timothy screwing something out of Loader Bot to get at some of the mechanisms in his arm, when it rains. Timothy's shielded by a rock just above him so he's using a flashlight held between his teeth as his light, and there are clouds in the sky. Rhys hasn't seen them like that, like, ever. It's all blue skies and black nights here. With Helios there, too. 

Rhys flinches when water hits his face, doesn't even process what it is the moment it's there because he's lived in space for forever and there's absolutely no weather in space, just stars and stars and stars, and Timothy sees it out of the corner of his eye, so he looks at Rhys, looks at the sky, then back to Rhys again. When Rhys flinches the second time, wiping the drop off his face in momentary confusion, Timothy grins, goes back to what he's doing, gives him a moment. 

It takes Rhys all of five seconds to realize he hates getting water dumped on him from the sky if only because his robotic arm is going to hate him if he stays any longer, but after scooting over into the same shade that Tim is working in, it's a much better vantage point to appreciate. It's neat to watch, especially in a place like this. 

There's some thunder rolling, too. 

He can't see Helios. There's too many clouds. 

It's perfect. 

He gets the sudden urge to thank Timothy for saving him, for giving him a chance and putting up with his fears and pretty much everything, for letting him experience things like this and letting him forget all the stuff that's been done to him and everyone around him, if only for a few days while he gets his bearings. 

He gets out one syllable, retracts it because he's an idiot that can't make up his mind, and pulls it off as a cough. Timothy stops what he's doing altogether to look at him. 

"Careful," Timothy says through a mouthful of flashlight handle, then takes it out so he can actually speak, "you're not used to too much weather, right? You're really not gonna like having a cold in the Dust, it sucks, trust me, I'll be done in a minute. You can go back in, I'll be right there."


End file.
